This is a real funny one. Mostly because its so true.

CS Nav Links is a browser plugin for the Couchsurfing Website. Due to the many changes the new Corporation is making,  finding your way around the site has become increasingly difficult. The Community Team has ignored our feedback, so the community had to come up with its own solution.

With CS Nav Links you can gain access to many parts of the website with ease.

This script appends useful links to the dropdown menu and also changes some of the images on the site to remove the ugly round porthole look and go back to a more traditional square image

Download the plugin, and give their fan page a like!

• Download for Chrome
• Download for Firefox

On Jan 7th we caught wind that a man by the name of Steven Kladec had set off on one of the largest online scams the CS community has been hit with to date. He orchestrated several fake events masquerading as Couchsurfing, was selling tickets, and spamming local community leaders trying to get them to promote it.

While Couchsurfing sat on their hands, the couchsurfing community members in the Southern US scrambled to figure out who this guy was, and why he was trying to promote these events with such a high price tag. Emails went back and forth between Ambassadors and active community members - What they found was beyond alarming, and the lack of interest from Couchsurfing Corporation to take care of the problem was even more disturbing. 

Thanks to an awesome code ninja, we now all have a way to export our couch surfing contacts, references and profile data (including pictures) into a reusable format. Import into Gmail, for example, or save a copy to import into a new website. You even get to look at some statistics about your good ol' CS days.

FYI: Along with the info you'll get a json file. JSON is text based and stands for JavaScript Object Notation (http://www.json.org/). Don't corrupt your exported json so one day you will be able to import it into another place on the web and then "ta-da!" all of your reference info, etc suddenly reappears all nice and neat and all you had to do was import a file. So if you hate the brackets, squigglys, colons, quotation marks, and commas, first make a Copy of the exported file before formatting it to be pleasantly readable.

Visit CSExport.org to get started!

Enjoy!

But this is the first time we've heard of a group being deleted like this:

http://www.couchsurfing.org/group.html?gid=59753 (Leaving CS for bewelcome)

From the information shared by community manager Sam Houston in discussions on Pages, it is clear that:

1) The information coalesced in groups over years is not lost.

2) Groups and Pages can run in parallel.

3) Pages would be modelled more and more on the lines of Groups. 

Then I am truly lost why CS cannot give us back the groups, even when the community overwhelmingly seems to be in favor of it. Why not return us the groups when you have the data, and yourself claim that pages and groups can work in tandem? Why re-build a resource that took years to be useful from scratch again?

I am unable to think of a 'reasonable' explanation. The fact that you do not have the grace or the spine to own up when you have obviously erred despite being adults, does not count as a reasonable explanation.

-Puneet

Remember how we told you Couchsurfing.org's new Terms of Use where even worse than Facebook's?

"Privacy campaign group europe-v-facebook, which has been lobbying for better data protection by Facebook for over a year, said on Tuesday it planned to go to court to appeal against decisions by the data protection regulator in Ireland, where Facebook has its international headquarters.

The move is one of a number of campaigns against the giants of the internet, which are under pressure from investors to generate more revenue from their huge user bases but which also face criticism for storing and sharing personal information."

Sound familiar?

The council petitioned Couchsurfing to give back our groups. Read the reply.