Welcome to all new members coming from VT

I just wanted to give an official welcome to all the new members coming in from Virtual Tourist. It's always a shame to see a travel community, particularly with as much history as VT, being shut down. I do hope we can provide a reasonable alternative.

I realise we don't offer all the same things that were on offer there. However, I am very open to suggestions from the community on things that could be added. In particular if there were certain features on VT which you felt really were a drawcard, please mention them on here so I can look into whether it's something I can add to the site.

Looking forward to getting to know you all!

Thank you Peter for your warm welcome!

Hello Peter,

Thanks a lot for your welcome message here. I am looking forward to being part of the community, but it will probably take some time until we all have downloaded and saved all our stuff from VT. Its official closue is announced for end of February.

Nice to feel wanted here.

Thank you for your warm welcome Peter. I am still in shock with regards to VT as it has been part of my life for so many years. I too am looking forward to making a positive contribution in the future but Initially I have to download all my stuff from VT before it closes down.

Clare

Peter, what I've seen requested most so far as lacking here compared to what VT offers are the following:

1) "Personal" travel tips (and reports?)
Would maybe fit well as a type of "personal" subpage to the destination pages on the wiki, where only the original creator has rights to edit it? I get the sense that these are really individual recommendations on "do take a walk along the west side of town" or "avoid the restaurants on the market square", which wouldn't quite fit in with the more factual feel of the guide. VT seems to have "ratings" for tips as well, so the most helpful tips drift to the top?
VT members are currently busy saving all their tips of this sort which only exist on VT, since that's a lot of very valuable content, and it's probably going to be lost forever otherwise.

2) Functionality to enable frequent meetups.
This one I'm more vague on. Everyone: how exactly does this work over on VT? Is there like a calendar, or a way to sign up as interested, or a group chat, or...?

Quoting Sander

Peter, what I've seen requested most so far as lacking here compared to what VT offers are the following:

1) "Personal" travel tips (and reports?)

Yes, that is totally correct. That's what I miss here the most. VT members are used to write personal tips about all destinations, so not only the major towns like London and Paris, but about really off the beaten path places.

Don't worry too much, we don't want to be demanding. We will see what the Travellerspoint community has to offer.

Hi,

As others have said above too, I'd like to thanks you for the welcome here.
VT has been in out lives for so long and for such a big amount of (daily) time, that lots of us are now feeling somewhat lost ... but to immediately see you guys here asking us what we'd miss the most here compared to VT is really special, so thanks!

What we mean by our travel pages is that in VT we could build our own pages flr a destination. We could do that on whatever 'level', be it continent, country, province, city, ...
These pages were only to be edited by the member itself but could be viewed by all (also non-members).
When we wrote the individual tips/reviews, these could be found on our destination page. It's in these tips that we would specify what Sander said above to be "really individual recommendations".

Maybe some other VT'er might correct me if I'm forgetting something here

Yes Sander, you hit the nail on the head. VT's travel pages were never meant to be neither complete nor objective travel guides. They were individual reports with each author's subjective experiences, impressions and views, and no one else interfered with the texts (unless they were against the rules, of course). Depending on people's interests and likings, background knowledge, duration of stay and so on, they differed widely in depth, quality, focuses, opinions. Just like asking individual people to tell you about their holidays, when everyone will tell you something different.

I think we can easily do without that ratings thing, as it has caused ambitions, which have occasionally caused distress. But being able to write personal reports and tips would be great - anyway, let's see. First we have to figure out the features you have on your site and the possibilities that TP members already have.

As for the meetings, this is a feature that let's us create a meeting in a certain location.
Other members can sign up if they know they'll attend or just follow if they're interested.
Euromeet
But as Horscheck has already said, we'll browse around here and see what you have to offer ... we're not expecting to see this website turn into what we knew before