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Just to be clear, meetup offers no free level services. If you want a group of any type or size, you must pay for it.
Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#22So they've organised a conference using Meetup? It doesn't seem to me like that's what Meetup is intended for
"Meetup's mission is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize." [1]
If meetup.com don't want to be used for promoting conferences then they've got every right to shut this down.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#23Meetup is quite a bad service, but I don't know any better alternatives. I was one of the organizers of one of the larger meetups, with over 4K members. Some issues: * The tools are nowhere near adequate to handle this amount of people, and more geared towards small groups * However, there is NO way to switch: Your data is locked in with Meetup: There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members. * You c…
You can cancel a group. You have to email customer service and ask them to delete it.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#24I run three meetups and know a bunch of the folks that work there. They are extremely fair minded people. Fairer than I am myself. Given what I know of the people, the service, and my experience hosting three meetups, this story doesn't feel right. Meetup has done a lot to bolster the tech community in NYC. I have met almost all of my tech friends in NYC via meetups. Meetup employees even come to some of my meetups.…
I just went to the meetup facebook page and the most recent post is: >Have been double charged for the group and now my group is shut down. I tried to contact the company 3 times and no response. What is going on? Is there customer service? and not to mention this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698541 Seems like meetup's customer service is not so hot.
As a former employee, I'd actually say that the customer service team is one of the best I've ever worked with and they take everything very seriously.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#25I run three meetups and know a bunch of the folks that work there. They are extremely fair minded people. Fairer than I am myself. Given what I know of the people, the service, and my experience hosting three meetups, this story doesn't feel right. Meetup has done a lot to bolster the tech community in NYC. I have met almost all of my tech friends in NYC via meetups. Meetup employees even come to some of my meetups.…
False positives always suck, and for good reason. The thing is that it's not that easy to get it right, no matter how good the algorithms or the data-sets are. Just in the last two days I've had gmail decide to tag as spam two messages received from different people, with whom it is true I had not communicated before via email, but whose messages had nothing spammy about them and were of great interest to me.
And now I'm left wondering if a email that I sent to a third person a week or so ago wasn't tagged as spam as well. That person has not responded yet, and I'm reverse-engineering in my head if maybe me including two links to Imdb in the said email could have been enough to tag it as spam, or if I finally decide to follow up with a second email and probably making a fool of myself would it be wise to in include the word "spam" in the message, as in "Hey, did you happen to check your Spam folder?"
Like I said, false positives are a bitch, for both users and developers
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#26Why is this hosted on GitHub?
Since when is Github a personal blog hosting service?
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#27Meetup is quite a bad service, but I don't know any better alternatives. I was one of the organizers of one of the larger meetups, with over 4K members. Some issues: * The tools are nowhere near adequate to handle this amount of people, and more geared towards small groups * However, there is NO way to switch: Your data is locked in with Meetup: There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members. * You c…
It was abundantly clear from the time Heiferman founded meetup 10 years ago they were pursuing a gatekeeper model with a lock in strategy. When that struggled to take off they had to relax the gatekeeping a bit, but they're never really changed their spots. Another example of a widely used service where users trade off a list of hidden & future downsides for a little immediate convenience.
Lock in strategy? The strategy is to foster local community--nothing else. If it would work to not charge money they would. In fact, pretty much the only reason Meetup charges is to ensure organizers have "skin in the game" and as a result take it more seriously.
Meetup has a very well put together and well documented API. You can pretty much get all you need from that if you'd like to migrate away from Meetup, though, they do in fact make it hard to get email addresses to avoid spam.
But, you could easily write a simple OAuth app which authenticated a user, pulled their details and asked for an email address to migrate away.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#28Not listed: the offending description, on which the whole thing seems to hinge.
Meetup.com seems like an awful choice for conference registration, or any one-off kind of event. I've been running not-for-profit tech conferences for a few years, and the mix of Eventbrite for registration (especially if it's a free-to-attend event, as mine are), and Lanyrd for schedule, speaker, session listings, and social interaction have turned out to be the perfect mix for me.
The only thing I'm missing out of those two is a system for accepting and voting/choosing speakers and sessions, but hey, I'm a developer, there are ways. :)
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#29I've joined Meetup just recently as I moved to a new area and wanted to peruse the local tech scene. As soon as I joined, I was spammed by an invite to join pitchbox.com,- meetup.com was the only service that knew about my new consultant firm address. First sentence cordially read: "Hey friend, welcome to pitchbox... "
So while I like their service, color me not impressed and please stop spamming us guys.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#30I run three meetups and know a bunch of the folks that work there. They are extremely fair minded people. Fairer than I am myself. Given what I know of the people, the service, and my experience hosting three meetups, this story doesn't feel right. Meetup has done a lot to bolster the tech community in NYC. I have met almost all of my tech friends in NYC via meetups. Meetup employees even come to some of my meetups.…
False positives always suck, and for good reason. The thing is that it's not that easy to get it right, no matter how good the algorithms or the data-sets are. Just in the last two days I've had gmail decide to tag as spam two messages received from different people, with whom it is true I had not communicated before via email, but whose messages had nothing spammy about them and were of great interest to me. And now…
False positives are understandable and expected. I think the larger issue is how to handle them. Meetup's method is to completely delete the event, registrants and all info related.
I think it'd make more sense to flag it with a delay for permanent deletion.