Tech Status
The statements and opinions on this page are solely those of its authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of CouchSurfing International.
Tech News page provides an overview of what's happening behind the scenes with the technology of the CouchSurfing website, collectively written by the Tech Team and other people interested. Anu is currently in charge of editing this page and would appreciate your feedback on it!
Check out what is being discussed by the developers present at the NZ Collective.
Features
Navigation
- Simpler navigation for new users - you can give it a try now by choosing Latest Look on you profile preferences. Developer in charge: Joe Edelman
Groups
For group reorganization work going on all over the site some new features were created to ease the volunteers' work:
- Multiple moderators for the groups - this is a helpful tool when merging groups (current undertaking of the group reorganization group) and will help with getting work delegated easily in the CS Organizational groups
- Groups can now be merged: this will help in the case of having 5 New York related groups or 2 different Sauna groups in multiple branches of the group tree. Developer in charge:
Gardner -> ???
- Polls are available in the groups, contact the group moderator to have polls available in a specific group. (developer in charge: Matrixpoint)
Search & locations
Search now comes in multiple flavors:
- with a map! You can also write down city name OR use the hierarchical system to choose your desired location. (developer in charge: Matrixpoint)
- with text-based search you will soon be able to find e.g. cyclists in Manhattan, geeks who like dancing in Antarctica... possibilities are endless and completely up to you! (developer in charge: Joe Edelman)
- Matrixpoint has been gathering troops to help with fixing Wrong locations - contact him if cities and states in your country are still out of place and wish to become part of our location fixer team.
Community enhancements
Community enhancements have been done to help the CS Ambassadors and other friendly folks in their work to bring our community closer together.
- New Ambassador system with 4 different roles has been on the works and is ready for release. New ambassadors will be toggled in early March. Greetings has gotten a bit more local touch lately (developer in charge: Anu)
- We take member services seriously - to this end some back-end work has been done for Contact us section (developers in charge: Anu, Jim)
- Chat was vamped up to version 4 - with recent hardware you should be getting a snappier chat experience. (developer in charge:
Tristan) -> ???
Basic infrastructure
Tech team has been doing lots of undercover work in reorganizing the site code to be more approachable for new developers and make it ready for web 2.0 improvements. While this work is important, it is very easy to disregard as when everything goes as it should, you will not notice the changes - it's like reworking the basement while the house above stays intact. Big thumbs up for Kasper and Joe Edelman for taking the lead in this, as well as Keith and Kristen for their contributions in cleaning up the code used for layouts.
This includes:
- Refactoring code to be more modular
- Making pages faster to download by gradually moving all layout to be done via CSS
- Making pages more cross-browser compatible by writing valid HTML
- Making functionality easier to understand to new developers.
- Improving ways to distribute code to remote developers.
- Improving ways to evaluate contributions of new developers and increasing number of code changes.
- Assessing quality of interactions with the database and enabling faster queries based on this.
- Assessing and improving internal and external communication structure of the Tech Team to enable efficient communications and remote collaboration after the NZ Collective ends.
Open source projects
Open source enthusiasts in the Tech Team are figuring out ways to enable connections between different travellers' networks via exchanging profile data in a standardized way. They are also starting brand-new open source projects with CS roots:
Need a ride? Tired of thumbing it? Look no further...
What has been done before?
Upcoming features
- Wordpress blog integration is advancing - about 95% of the coding is done, but we need a developer familiar with Wordpress and willing to sign the NDA to do the rest of the integration. This could be one of our current current core contributors but get in touch if you think you could help out. (developer in charge: ?)
- Calendar events from couch request into your favourite calendar program - check out Calendar integration (developer in charge: Anu)
Bugs
As nasty as Bugs can sometimes be, it is important to keep people updated about them. In the following section you can find information about major issues we are having, how to overcome them and helpful links to further information.
You can find first-hand bug info here:
Current Major Bugs
- Group messages, while sorted by last reply date, appear by first
- Messages occasionally have delays on forwarding
- Missing languages: some less widely spoken languages are missing from our system, but we'd be glad to add them. See the Missing languages page for more instructions.
- Lived/Travelled/Wants To Go locations in profiles are not editable.
- Verification codes cannot be inserted sometimes.
- Temporary passwords sometimes do not work.
- Changing password on 'edit profile' results in the message 'Please enter a password that is at least five characters' despite the fact that both passwords entered are > 5 chars. Password does not get updated.
Workarounds for some Bugs
- Not staying logged in: check keep me logged in option below password field.
- Not being able to log OUT: try deleting all cookies (should be under your browser options) and relaunching the browser (might not help in all cases)
- Password retrieval is sometimes not working. If this happens, you need to let an Admin know.
Bugs to be worked on next
Recently fixed bugs
Further resources
article history
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