
Meetup.com kills Vim London without warning - hcm
http://vimcasts.org/blog/2012/10/vim-london-still-alive-in-spite-of-meetup-com/
======
DavidWoof
Organizing a meetup and then using the first meeting to promote your own
commercial product is bound to raise some flags at meetup.org. And I'm really
glad it does, otherwise we'd be inundated with meetup spam as every product
launch creates a group on meetup.org for the free publicity.

I really like Drew Neil's work on vimcasts, but he goofed here and didn't
really think it through. I suspect that if he resubmits the group without the
personal promotion everything will go fine. As far as I can tell, they didn't
kick a pre-existing group, but rather turned down the request for a new group.

~~~
nelstrom
The feedback I got from Meetup.com was that:

> the lack of content in your description looked suspicious. Generally
> speaking, we are known for reaching out to Meetup Groups when the content
> posted in the group description is unclear. In your case, the content may
> have been very sparse, but your motive was super clear: "Fans of Vim, the
> text editor". It's a shame that one of the most clearly defined Meetup
> Groups ended up setting off an alarm.

The fact that I mentioned Practical Vim had nothing to do with our account
being closed down.

By the way, meetup didn't turn down our original request to set up the group.
The Vim London group had been established for about 10 days before it was
closed down, and we had around 50 members.

------
sighup
This was a mistake on our part. We're reaching out and rectifying things now.
Sorry guys.

~~~
gm
The real bug here is to have unilateral action. It assumes you guys are
infallible, which no human is.

~~~
untog
Huh? I don't even know what that means. Of course Meetup needs to have
unilateral action- they need to shut down spammers, etc.

~~~
gojomo
They could make a warning/inquiry first, allowing a dialogue to explain a
murky case before damage is done by a 'unilateral' enforcement action. (Pretty
sure that's what grandparent post meant.)

~~~
untog
Just take a look at the number of spammers on Twitter, or (recently)
Instagram. It's not even possible to open up a dialogue for every single
instance of possible spam.

~~~
gm
Dude, you are missing completely the point. There's a vast difference between
automatically dealing with spam in Twitter and shutting down a paying customer
with legitimate (non-drone account) followers.

And this is not about spam, it's about TOS violation, itself much more
subjective than just spam.

I suspect you've never been on the other side of this equation.

Anyway, you are comparing apples to oranges.

------
softbuilder
I'm going to make a plug for Calagator here.
<https://github.com/calagator/calagator>

Calagator is an open-source community calendar project created for the tech
community in Portland, OR. Here it is in action: <http://calagator.org/>

It's a straight-forward Rails app (2.3.5/1.8.7 last I checked)

I'm not on the team that created it, I'm just a fan. I customized and deployed
it for a project last year and it was pretty easy.

I'm astounded more tech communities aren't using it or something similar.

~~~
palehose
Thanks for the link to Calagator. I have been looking for any sort of open
source alternative to meetup and had not found anything. I really don't
understand why there isn't anything comparable that is open source already.
I've seen a few other software as a service companies that basically just
mimic meetup's business model, but I am especially interested in seeing an
open source alternative to meetup.

Installing software on a VPS is close enough to "putting a little skin in the
game" and having any sort of social marketing strategy of your own takes real
effort even if someone is not getting paid for doing it. The only compelling
reasons for using meetup seem to be the marketing association to the meetup
name and that there isn't any other comparable software that is primarily
focused on face to face meetings.

It seems to me like meetup has its hands full with the magnitude of hosting so
many organizations and having a smaller install base from an open source
project would eliminate the scaling complexity and allow an open source
project to not only compete as a cheaper alternative, but also innovate in
ways meetup can't. There are so many features that I don't understand why
meetup hasn't built into their site, especially since they are making money
from every organization that is hosted on their site.

There are so many other methods of advertizing outside of Meetup that I don't
think that using Meetup is the greatest marketing tool ever. If I were trying
to organize a group of people, I don't know that I would especially want to
target other people who already use meetup for other meetings. I would rather
recruit on the basis of whatever the focus of the organization is. There is a
lot of scarcity of meetups outside of major cities too. It is sort of like
Craigslist in that regard. I think it would be especially compelling to launch
a site around a given community and use that brand to promote meetings, sort
of like how people use ravelry to communicate with fellow knitters.

------
tomblomfield
They're probably Emacs users

~~~
ihuman
It could be worse. They could be nano users.

Edit: I ment this a joke on the war of Vim vs Emacs vs the world. I guess it
didn't come out that way.

~~~
athesyn
what's wrong with preferring low-average learning curve text editors?

~~~
Karunamon
low average learning curve : high average learning curve

radio flyer : motorcycle

~~~
faul_sname
Or car : motorcycle, depending on why the learning curve is low/high.

------
oinksoft
There's a ripe market opportunity for a free or significantly cheaper
alternative to Meetup, unless I'm unaware of a competitive one that already
exists. $12/month is absurd for what amounts to a BB service with a handful of
social networking features.

~~~
jonathanjaeger
Actually it seems like a very reasonable price. The community (and the name)
is a valuable asset. People who join Meetup discover new meetups -- it's a
community with network effects. It's not that easy to reach that kind of
scale. $12/month is perfectly reasonable, not because of the software, but
because of the value baked into it.

~~~
donretag
LinkedIn can very easily take control of professional meetups, but no one has
the brains to do it. LinkedIn has group, has events, but both features are
terrible, lack good APIs and are not integrated.

I would rather join a technical group on LinkedIn with events instead of using
Meetup. The community is already there and almost all of us have LinkedIn
accounts.

LinkedIn: please fix groups, please fix events.

EDIT: Forgot about Google Plus and events. Another potential alternative to
Meetup.

------
xoail
I hate it when companies make these decisions without warning the customers.
Even if they are doing something against their terms.

~~~
jasonlotito
From what I gather, this was the first meetup being organized, and the first
meeting was in part to promote a product. This should raise red flags.
Otherwise, it becomes a wonderfully cheap spam vector. (Meetup sends noticed
to users when local grous are added that users say they are interested in).

As a user of Meetup.org, I'm find with this level of oversight. As long as he
can go about getting the meeting reestablished, I see no harm being done, and
everything working appropriately.

------
aidos
Well, this is the first I've heard of the meetup and now I'm interested. The
cancellation might be a blessing in disguise in that regard...

------
hcm
Looks like it's back up <http://www.meetup.com/Vim-London>

------
diminoten
> In their generic message, they don’t indicate which product was apparently
> being promoted.

Yes, I too, was baffled as to which product they could possibly be referring
to.

------
PedroBatista
They got SWAT-ed by those evil emacs guys.

------
rossjudson
If meetup.com isn't willing to have at least a SINGLE exchange of emails prior
to killing your group, they don't deserve your business, or anyone else's.
That's just lazy, period. A "specialist" shouldn't be able to close a group
without following a procedure. A single opinion is not a procedure.

------
senorcastro
It might be a long night, so bring your magic the gathering cards.

~~~
reubensutton
I suggest that you're probably on the wrong website if you can't understand
why someone would want to listen to a talk about Vim or at least be tolerant
of people who do?

~~~
msellout
Funny, my first interpretation of his M:TG suggestion was that he enjoys
playing and hopes others will also bring their cards to play with him.

