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Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

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Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#31

Post by analog »

city41 wrote: post #20
j2labs wrote: post #8

I 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.

That post is from a couple of hours ago, so maybe give them a little time. Reading down through the wall they seem to be responding to most requests posted there.

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#32

Post by thehodge »

ghurlman wrote: post #28

Not 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…

I think Lanyrd can do CfP and selecting these days?

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#33

Post by analog »

j2labs wrote: post #8

I 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 don't even think this is a false positive. They claim the conference is 'not for profit' which sounds all nice and fluffy, but it is sponsored by three orgs [1]. Even if they don't turn a profit on the first year they're still building the brand of the conference.

The takeaway here is don't try to use Meetup to promote your conference.

[1] http://summit2013.reversim.com/

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#34

Post by danso »

PanMan wrote: post #5

Meetup 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…

> There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members.

Er...doesn't this pose a privacy issue that Meetup has to be concerned about? When someone signs up for a Meetup group, do the TOS include the possibility that your information and associations could be exported somewhere else?

Because I would be annoyed that if I had signed up for a Meetup group, where, IIRC, my email address is not explicitly known...and the group's admin decides to export all the data and import it into a Facebook Group (if that were even possible). What actual group data do you want from Meetup?

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#35

Post by dbpatterson »

Hovertruck wrote: post #24
city41 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have an explanation for all these examples then (they seem to contradict your statement)? Or have you just worked with really bad customer service teams?

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#36

Post by lnanek2 »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #3

That is a pretty dramatic response to Meetup deleting a group. I've never created a group, but it seems the event WAS outside of the intended use of Meetup. It looks like poster was trying to use it to host a single event where Meetup wants you to create groups that meet and communicate regularly. To me, it looks like the poster was indeed using Meetup as a listing service. I think the telling piece of information th…

They probably get a constant amount of spammers making fake meetups to collect information from people who sign up. That's why they delete them so easily. Much like how Google kicks people out of AdWords so easily because people are always signing up and getting robots to click ads, bans them on Google Groups so easily, etc.. I can get banned on Google Groups just by opening a bunch of tabs to read later. Makes me look too much like a bot.

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#37

Post by lnanek2 »

PanMan wrote: post #5

Meetup 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…

There actually is an API to access meetup data. I've used it before to get the names of attendees to provide to building security before. Maybe it didn't exist last time you used meetup, though.

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#38

Post by MichaelGG »

Maxious wrote: post #2

See also "Meetup.com kills Vim London without warning" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698541 particularly http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698718 > This was a mistake on our part. We're reaching out and rectifying things now. Sorry guys. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, hello Eventbrite!

Not saying that Meetup is great, and Eventbrite might be vastly better. But a simple 2-strike rule is worthless. You need to look at the actual error rate (in this case, essentially a spam false positive) to determine if Meetup is truly a poor service. Otherwise, any smaller service will look better because they will have less complaints in absolute terms.

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#39

Post by tgeek »

Fmr Meetup employee, for about 2.5 years, several years ago now. On the tech side, but the company is/was small enough that everyone got some voice about how things worked, which was fantastic.(note i say a voice, but not necessarily a vote)

This post reads a lot like "I violated TOS, and got shutdown for it, and now I'm going to complain because that isn't "fair"." WAAAAA.

The person who wrote this post used Meetup in the way Meetup doesn't want it's service to be used. What this person was looking for, was EventBrite, which is a fantastic site also, but geared to the idea of singular events that happen, and then go away. If the poster was trying to create a group of regularly meeting/communicating folks, to foster a true community, then Meetup would have most likely not shut them down. This is a lot different than the Vim London story, which it seems Meetup rectified after gathering better understanding ( seems like someone from community support responded to internal tooling flagging what looked like a violation and didn't understand what Vim was. Honestly, does your company's support people know what Vim is??). Meetup has a right to defend the use of their platform as they see fit, and when they do things like this its not for the one organizer who did the wrong thing, its for the X number of members who are part of groups who Meetup protects like a guard dog.

Meetup's support org is top notch, and they spend day and night watching an ever growing online community. When I was there we dealt with everything from Kiddie Porn Groups, Hate groups, illegal prescription sellers, pushy marketers, SPAMmers from around the world, and people who just generally wanted to abuse the trust that the platform tried to foster. The poster here hasn't posted the contents of what his Meetup group was defined as, nor has he posted the wording of the event. Note event in the singular sense, as opposed to events, or community, which is Meetup's purpose.

How about if you want to fling shit at a great company that serves a large user base with respect and honesty, you do the same before flinging out a "poor me/evil company" post without any basis for proof of your case. I would imagine a "12 year veteran" would get how this should work.

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#40

Post by Hovertruck »

dbpatterson wrote: post #35
Hovertruck wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have an explanation for all these examples then (they seem to contradict your statement)? Or have you just worked with really bad customer service teams?

Well regarding this incident specifically, it seems pretty clear (at least to me) that a group was created specifically to host a conference, which is not allowed. A Meetup Group is supposed to be a community, not just an event. Things like this are really what services like EventBrite are for.
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