Thank you all for your own views on the story. As @Nathalie1 just mentioned, trust and respect is the go-to statement I’d like to highlight, however for the sake of a healthy community, we must make our way to be sure that everyone follows that. And there’s just two ways of doing so: policing or enforcing.
While none of them are a one-choice option, I believe that a mix of them would deliver great results. Regarding your case @Bluehorse, enforcing is the way to go, if the platform did allow an option to prevent receiving requests that do not meet the minimum criteria, then you’d no longer receive them.
Right now the general trend is about mass-sending the same request to everyone. Enforcing a rate limiter on the number of requests that can be sent per hour, and / or implementing an algorithm that compares the requests to trigger an alert when the content is not changing would help stop mass spamming.
Yet, the key is to accomplish a community that cares about themselves, if you follow the principles of trust and respect, you won’t be mass spamming hosts, you’d be reading with care each of the conditions before even sending a request, you’d be writing a personalized message.
Policing could help on this, with a way for hosts to provide feedback on the reasons after they are declining. A sufficient signal from different hosts who report would be enough to send a warning to the member to stop and rethink, facing temporary account suspension.
Answering to you individually @Kirsten-Cph, yes I do agree points have enabled a transactional mindset, however they aren’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just something that needs to be won, and that happens when you genuinely give back to the community, not when you pay for signup.
Whatsoever, it’s on the hand of the platform to make any of these possible. For your information, I shared this same concern in the forums of the other countries where HomeExchange is present as well, with the goal of creating a unified voice. I invite you to take a look at the opinions of other users to find some inspiration—some interesting proposals have come up:
In these forums, on the other hand, there are no responses from community members yet:
