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Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

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

#71

Post by sighup »

I work at Meetup.

Meetup does review every new group and we discourage using the service for one off events. That said its not our policy to reject them out of hand and there should have been contact from a person on our community team prior to the decision to remove the group. In this case 'remove' most certainly doesn't mean delete. There's plenty of developers at Meetup that understand the value of not deleting data. The Meetup Group has been flipped back to approved and is accesible on site.

We are sorry when this happens, still, review of new groups is important to us -- there's a lot of new Meetups proposed every day that we really don't want to host on our platform. We have technology in place to help us with automatic classification, but while improving, its imperfect and in this case our safeguard of manual review was too quick to reject the group.

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

#72

Post by United857 »

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…

Also, no way to opt out of email announcements from a group short of completely leaving it.

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

#73

Post by freshhawk »

adamkiss wrote: post #46
MichaelGG wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But a simple 2-strike rule is worthless. If paid service unrestorably deletes data without first getting in touch with client, it is worthless, as you should have moved away first time it happened.

So far both cases were for events promoting a specific product. They were in the grey area for sure (this one less so) but they were both in the same grey area.

So yes, now I will definitely not use them for anything related to me trying to sell something, but I wouldn't have anyway, and continue using them for actual meetups based on common interests.

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

#74

Post by sighup »

United857 wrote: post #72
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…

Also, no way to opt out of email announcements from a group short of completely leaving it.

You can opt out of all announcements from a Meetup Group. We used to require that you receive announcements from organizers, but we recently allowed you to unsubscribe from those as well as the automated announcements.

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

#75

Post by netaustin »

I interviewed with them a few years back, and they asked about deletion strategies. The interviewer, one of their lead developers, agreed with my "set a deletion flag and garbage collect to an archive database" response. Maybe things have changed there since 2008.

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

#76

Post by city41 »

tgeek wrote: post #51
city41 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with that, however just pulling the plug with no warning is really unprofessional. They could have given them a heads up and some time to figure out a plan. They weren't maliciously using meetup, just using it slightly incorrectly.

Fmr employee as well. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess you've never been involved in running/managing a huge online community(ies) with in person social interactions as the primary goal. I might be wrong, so apologies ahead of time if so. Anywho - It actually isn't unprofessional when the goal is to protect the members from some organizer who might be malicious in nature. There are a lot of rules and guidanc…

Everything you say is correct, at the very least technically. I still feel meetup can do better here. Why not just disable the group? To everyone else it looks as though the group is gone or at least indisposed, but admins can still log in and see things while the issue gets resolved? This would also give meetup a chance to indicate to the admins why the group was disabled and options they can do to fix it. Potentially a win/win for everyone, as the group could evolve into a profitable one with a little bit of coaxing/aid.

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

#77

Post by bgruber »

city41 wrote: post #76
tgeek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fmr employee as well. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess you've never been involved in running/managing a huge online community(ies) with in person social interactions as the primary goal. I might be wrong, so apologies ahead of time if so. Anywho - It actually isn't unprofessional when the goal is to protect the members from some organizer who might be malicious in nature. There are a lot of rules and guidanc…

Everything you say is correct, at the very least technically. I still feel meetup can do better here. Why not just disable the group? To everyone else it looks as though the group is gone or at least indisposed, but admins can still log in and see things while the issue gets resolved? This would also give meetup a chance to indicate to the admins why the group was disabled and options they can do to fix it. Potential…

what you are describing is exactly what happened.

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

#78

Post by apgwoz »

dickbasedregex wrote: post #60
apgwoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, thoug…

Becuase the API is really a valid option for the average user...

I can name no website that makes migrating away from itself easy. The fact that you can more or less get everything you need to migrate off of Meetup with a couple of scripts is pretty good in comparison.

If it's too much trouble as an "average" user, it's not too hard to find someone who can help.

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

#79

Post by apgwoz »

city41 wrote: post #21
[deleted] wrote: post #12

[deleted]

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.

That's not entirely true: http://www.meetup.com/everywhere, though Everywhere is not really intended to be a free replacement to the "groups" product.

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

#80

Post by ghurlman »

thehodge wrote: post #32
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?

You can list the calls for $x, but there's no process for selection behind it.
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