Warmshowers.org Spring News

Hello to all of you! I want to let you know about three very important things:

1. Roger Gravel has retired as registrar of WarmShowers.org. After founding the list and maintaining it for more than 12 years, Roger decided that he wanted to relax a little bit, and has handed off the baton. I think Roger's contribution to touring cyclists deserves a worldwide celebration of all that he did for us by establishing and maintaining the list all those years. In the beginning, Roger maintained a text-oriented list and provided it on the internet, doing email correspondence with each member. When we turned the site into a website, Roger corresponded with each and every new member, and did followup to find missing or unreachable members. Thanks, Roger! (Roger remains on the site as a host. Send him a "thank you". I doubt that after all that work he knows how much people appreciate what he did all those years.)  Probably the biggest disappointment for Roger, from Québec, was that we didn't get a French version of the site up. But in his honor...
2. We're going to try translating the site into other languages again!  We're hoping to do French and Spanish first as soon as we get the technology working. We're looking for a very few people who are native French or Spanish speakers, understand English, and would be willing to take on this project. It's not too hard, but it will require some dedication. If you think you might be able to work on this, send us a note .
3. Chris Russo spearheaded a massive update of the site to the latest version of Drupal so that we can get in position to do the translating of the site. Thanks, Chris! He spent uncounted volunteer hours using his PHP and Drupal expertise to make the changes to custom code that had to be made for us to get the upgrade to happen.

And some small things you might want to know:

• You can get daily emails of postings in the forums if you'd like. Just click here.
• Registration is now a little bit easier and faster. New users can automatically validate their account and then sign in.
• You can (and should) write recommendations of members you've hosted or stayed with. This helps other members to have confidence in future contacts with these members and builds our community.
• Please do log into the site and make sure your contact information and address is up-to-date . It helps everyone so much when they can send an email or make a call and not have to deal with the wonder of whether they'll be able to get in touch or not. Please check your location on the map for accuracy as well. Touring cyclists may be misled if the marker is far off from your real location.
• As of today, Warmshowers.org has 7307 members, up from a bit over 1000 in 2005! Click here to see the numbers.

And as always, thanks for your hospitality to touring cyclists!

-Randy Fay, webmaster