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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
More than just a straight-forward Rails app, it's been cleaned up so that a Heroku/etc. deployment is hassle-free! I spent some time in the Portland tech community and Calagator made the experience much nicer than Meetup.com ever has in my default tech environment of Seattle.
As an ex-Meetuper I can say that theres a diversity of editors in use. Largely Emacs and Vim, but a few eclipse, a few TextMate, and probably a few Sublime users too.
Lets not get rude, I've met some of them. They're bright folks using all sorts of technologies. I've seen vim and emacs (though mostly emacs). Their website does have some rough corners but they're working on a 10+ year old codebase and you'll get that as technologies age out. Their product however isn't just their website but instead their service. (The're a social company that isn't about virtual networks but physical ones.) And judging by how they fixed the misunderstanding it's doing pretty good.
Nano is actually quite powerful. Check out the nanorc manfile for all the options, and /usr/share/nano for the various supported languages and fileformats.
Nano provides syntax highlighting, auto indentation, and multiple buffers.
It's kinda funny that Nano is so easy to use people never bother to look into actually configuring it, unlike Emacs which has consumed my entire workflow.
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.
As a user of meetup.com - not an organiser - I like the $12/month.
It keeps pretty much all of the casual spammers out. It keeps the quality of meetups high since the organisers have to put a little skin in the game - but no so much skin to prevent even small groups using the service.
I can remember when they didn't charge. The service was worse.
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.
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.
It is mostly the name that is the valuable asset. People right now think to begin their search on Meetup. Their brand is extremely valuable, but I think somebody can beat them on price and by making it easier (very inexpensive or free) to begin a new group.
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.
Well, it's certainly very annoying, but think of several circumstances:
* Hacked account. I actually, upon reflection, did not mind that Google shut everything down of mine when they labeled a blog as spam. What if it were spam written by someone who had hacked into my account? The key thing here is to make it very easy to prove you're you and get back in. And apologize profusely, and explain what it happened. I got everything back but the blog as soon as I confirmed an SMS'ed code. They did take more than a week to get the blog back on line, which was annoying, even if it was nothing important.
* Actual spammers would love to be able to test the boundaries and get quick feedback about what's going to work and what's not going to fly. They'll use any feedback you give them to improve their spamming techniques.
So... it's not easy. I think what pisses me off the most is that there's no appeal, no way to say "woah, I didn't do anything!"
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.
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?
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.