Meetup.com kills Vim London without warning

http://vimcasts.org/blog/2012/10/vim-london-still-alive-in-spite-of-meetup-com/

by hcm • 14 years ago

70 41 14 years ago

vimcasts.org

tomblomfield• 14 years ago

They're probably Emacs users

ihuman• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

wizard_2• 14 years ago

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.

parfe• 14 years ago

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.

Bill_Dimm• 14 years ago

You've obviously not used the meetup site. More likely, Notepad.

camus• 14 years ago

they use echo string >> script.txt , they are the real deal !

apgwoz• 14 years ago

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.

xoail• 14 years ago

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

krisajenkins• 14 years ago

Amen. Kicking a customer should be the absolute last resort, not the first step.

davidw• 14 years ago

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!"

jasonlotito• 14 years ago

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.

oinksoft2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

oinksoft2• 14 years ago

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.

donretag• 14 years ago

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.

ig1• 14 years ago

Depending on your needs there's GroupSpaces, Eventbrite, Google Groups, etc.

adrianhoward• 14 years ago

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.

For those who've not read it already, take a look at this story of when meetup decided to start charging decided to start charging http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2751-scott-heiferman-looks-ba...

petercooper• 14 years ago

Lanyrd should do it.

sighup• 14 years ago

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

gm2• 14 years ago

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

untog2• 14 years ago

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

aidos• 14 years ago

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...

senorcastro2• 14 years ago

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

reubensutton• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

senorcastro2• 14 years ago

You take yourself way too seriously.

DavidWoof• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

hcm• 14 years ago

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

softbuilder• 14 years ago

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.

briantrice• 14 years ago

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.

palehose• 14 years ago

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.

diminoten• 14 years ago

> 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.

rossjudson• 14 years ago

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.

PedroBatista• 14 years ago

They got SWAT-ed by those evil emacs guys.

Meetup.com kills Vim London without warning

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