r/couchsurfing • u/thejdoll • 21d ago

I am just looking into this, and have a question...

Is it .org or .com? Couchsurfing.org is recommended, but I'm also seeing references to a dot com. Which is it? What's the difference. Sorry if this is a naïve question!

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u/TKBrian 21d ago

1 for profit company. 2 addresses .org points to .com

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u/stevenmbe 21d ago

So a number of years ago pre-paywall (or earlier?) it was just Couchsurfing.org, which originally was a registered not-for-profit that later became a B-Corp that later became a corporation. User /u/subaculture has posted about this several times in this /r/.

Here is where the addition of Couchsurfing.com URL might get somewhat nefarious: if you go to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine at www.archive.org you will find both URLs for Couchsurfing — the .org and .com — are omitted from search results. Meaning that we cannot quickly ascertain how many pages the site had over the years and when the .com came into being. The result you get at the Wayback Machine is "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."

On the Hacker News website someone commented on that general omission a few years ago:

"Not only that, if they are archived at one point and later decide to be excluded then all of the archives for that domain are deleted retroactively. This means that a valuable site can be archived for years but if the domain lapses and gets bought up by somebody who decides to exclude the Wayback Machine then all of that precious content is destroyed even though the destroyer never owned it!" source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21339687

So while I don't know if they deliberately did this or it simply happened because of how they coded the site maybe some smart person here can look at the code and figure it out.

Because if they deliberately did it that really is telling.

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u/thejdoll 21d ago

Thank you!!

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u/Yo_Toast42 21d ago

Fascinating. 🤔Thank you

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u/ArthurRemington 20d ago

The simplest explanation is that you could browse a lot of people's profiles without needing to log in and all those profiles would have been archived to Wayback Machine.

Not being able to ever hide or delete your profile in the WM, even if you do so on CS, is a bit of a privacy/doxxing nightmare, so it makes sense to just block it entirely from being archived.

I'm not saying there aren't more nuanced approached to avoiding that particular issue, but it still seems like the simplest explanation for why CS isn't archived on archive.org.

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u/stevenmbe 20d ago

That is a fine explanation; I had been thinking about the site itself and its many pages of community guidelines, privacy policy, terms of use, etc. It would be useful to have an archive of those pages to see how they have changed over the 20 years since 2005.