Good news! Half of our hosts are now using their visitor book and our website can translate itself into most known languages!
As we start 2015 it’s really encouraging to know that half of our hosts are now using their visitor book! Of the 611 hosts in membership today, 305 have ‘enabled’ the visitor book so that their WWOOFers can leave feedback. Very strictly speaking of course that’s not quite half but it’s so close we hope you’ll forgive the hyperbole. In case you aren’t aware we introduced the visitor book to host listings on our website in October 2012. Hosts aren’t obliged to use it – they have to opt in to do so – and once it’s operating, hosts are alerted to any new comments by email and can then decide if they want the comment published or not. That may sound complicated but we wanted to ensure that hosts never felt out of control of the feedback being left about them and so far it’s working well. If that sounds like too much work, it is possible to let the WWOOF UK team moderate any feedback on a host’s behalf – just by selecting another check box in the setup process; 173 of our visitor book users have already done so. If you would like to use your visitor book but don’t know where to start please contact hosts@wwoof.org.uk and Taryn will help you out.
We would love to know your opinions of the visitor book. Does it work for you? Should it be automatically available for all hosts with the possibility of opting out? Please leave a comment below.
Thank you to Juliet McKenzie, a host of longstanding who sent us this: Thank you for all the wonderful work you do at WWOOF. I have been a member for about 35 years and still marvel at the foresight of Sue Coppard coming up with this simple and brilliant idea, which as we all know, has spread worldwide and given rise to many other similar organisations, especially HelpExchange. We love to receive all your feedback, especially when it’s as nice as this of course. Please keep in touch with us. Here WWOOFer David Vargas and two chickens help out in Juliet’s garden,
During December we introduced a new function to our website so that it will translate the content into virtually any language of your choice. You’ll see the ‘widget’ on the left hand side of the home page before you log in and then it’s available to WWOOFers who are logged in on their ‘My WWOOFing’ menu. We were very grateful to Nim Kibbler, a WWOOF UK director, who spent time experimenting with the function and encouraged us to stop it translating host names into the new language. That was just too weird! Please leave a comment to let us know if you think this is a good idea and about the other things you would like to see on the website. You’ll need to be logged in to your account to do so.
And finally thank you to all our WWOOFers who make such a difference. Hosts Rosemarie and Alex Barr sent us this photo saying: here’s our hardworking WWOOFer Minjung Kim from Korea, planting a willow hedge to extend our chicken run on a cold December morning at Fronrhydd, West Wales.
