But they are not trying to be smart, but cool, and they are so awesome that they don't need testing or user input.

Anyway, that's what they thought. Now they are backpaddling:

"Sam Houston


posted this on Dec 08 11:03







"Hey Couchsurfers,

Two days ago we launched Couchsurfing's latest new

addition, Place Pages. Place Pages are designed to create a central hub

for our community to connect with one another based on location, to find

other hosts and travelers in an area, and to find activities in the

area. This launch was also the beginning of a transition to a new

underlying technology that we'll be using to run all of

Couchsurfing.com, giving us future flexibility and agility so that we

can quickly update and iterate on the Couchsurfing services, as well as

give us the stability and site uptime that a worldwide service like

Couchsurfing needs.

While there are many things we feel that we did right with

the launch of Place Pages, we've heard a lot of feedback from our

community about what features are missing from Place Pages. We've been

constantly reading this feedback, discussing it internally at the

Couchsurfing office, and we're now working on a number of things that

our community has asked we add to Place Pages.

We're currently aiming to launch an update to Place Pages in the later part of next week, the week of December 9th - 15th. I'd

like to caveat this by saying that there may be unforeseen problems

that pop up and delay this update, but we're currently aiming to hit

late next week.

This is what we're working on currently and what we plan to launch late next week:





Adding Thread Titles to the Conversation section of the page.


We heard from many that they are not able to easily scan

over conversations and pick up the topic of conversation. We're adding

Thread Titles to address this issue.




Adding a Thread-view page for Place Page conversations.


Many members said that Conversations take up too much

visual space, especially in terms of height. We're adding an additional

way to view all conversations from a Place Page, and the new view will

look very similar to how Groups display threads with a collapsed view of

thread titles, author name, and last commenter/date.







Improving the naming of Cities/Areas on Place Pages


We're going to continuously correct and change the

naming of Cities/Areas, and we thank our community members that are

letting us know about these errors. Please continue to report these naming errors through this form.

We're removing areas that are not in the same country as

the location of the Place Page. This was a bug with the Place Page area

grouping, and we're correcting it.

Adding new Place Pages for cities that were incorrectly

grouped with other cities. These new Place Pages will be blank, and the

groups for those cities will remain in the Groups section of

Couchsurfing.com. If you feel your city was incorrectly grouped with another city, please report this error via this form.







Bugs - since this is a new technology

and new launch for us, we've found various bugs and issues that have

cropped up. We're going to continue to address these bugs and make sure

that the site is stable and consistently working for everyone.




We know that the above additions to Place Pages don't

address all of the feedback and comments we've received, but the

additions above are things that we can do in the short term. We're also

discussing and planning to work on other additions to Place Pages. These

include adding "Sticky Posts" to the top of Place Pages so that group

city moderators can add the content that used to be in the Group's

Details section. We're also currently discussing many other changes and

though I can't commit to any time table for these future additions, I

wanted to let everyone know that we're aware of these needs (and many

others) and we're going to be discussing how and when we can address

them. Just because your concerns are not listed in this post, it does

not mean that we feel your concerns are not valid or that we won't

address them in future updates. Thank you for your patience while we

work on these updates and iterations of Place Pages.

Couchsurfing is a community of millions of people from all

around the world, and the Couchsurfing community and experience is

something that is unique to everyone. We're fortunate enough to have a

very passionate community that has given us a lot of feedback, and we're

working on rapidly responding to that feedback. I'd like to personally

thank all members who have shared their thoughts with us so far.

It's currently 11am on Saturday morning in San Francisco

(where CS HQ is based), and I'll continue to be monitoring feedback in

this thread over the weekend. Sometimes I can't respond to everything

because of time and sometimes I'll be taking a break/sleeping, but I

want everyone to know that we're listening and reading the comments.

We're not able to respond to everything, but we're definitely reading

everything.

I know change can be hard and this has been a rough change

for some members of our community. Thanks again for your comments and

feedback, we're working hard to update Place Pages so that they can help

you connect with other Couchsurfers from all over the world in more

ways. We know the Couchsurfing community is very important to our

members, and that community is very important to us too.


Sincerely,


Sam Houston and the Couchsurfing team



PS: I've seen many members asking about moderating content on Place Pages. Please see our FAQ about Place Page content moderation, we've implemented a new system that empowers all community members to help moderate Place Page conversation content.""