Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts(gist.github.com) |
Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts(gist.github.com) |
> 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!
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.
* 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 can't just cancel a group: If you stop paying (which I did with a smaller group), it's offered to all members. All it takes is 1 spammer to pay, to spam all members. Basically, we are forced to keep paying for our group for years.
There is a big opportunity to build a better service here, but switching from meetup will be a pain.
When that struggled to take off they had to relax the gatekeeping a bit, but they're never really changed their spots.
Another example of a widely used service where users trade off a list of hidden & future downsides for a little immediate convenience.
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, though, they do in fact make it hard to get email addresses to avoid spam.
But, you could easily write a simple OAuth app which authenticated a user, pulled their details and asked for an email address to migrate away.
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?
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 know for a fact that they care about creating positive environments where attendees are not bombarded by commercial interests. They want you to go kayaking with other kayakers, talk about programming with programmers, or find out how to cook fantastic vegan food with other vegans.
False positives sometimes occur and it's a shame. Perhaps meetup could've been more proactive before shutting the group down. I personally feel confident that meetup looked at the group and made a fair decision that it was indeed violating the terms of service.
As I mentioned above, I host three meetups so perhaps I'm biased. Here are they: http://www.meetup.com/hack-and-tell/ - http://www.meetup.com/DUMBO-Tech-Breakfast/ - http://nyc.brubeck.io/
If folks would prefer to use eventbrite, obviously do so. Eventbrite has no community building tools. It is a website for tickets. Meetup, on the other hand, cares so much about building communities that their whole site is built for this purpose. You will lose that.
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 have turned out to be the perfect mix for me.
The only thing I'm missing out of those two is a system for accepting and voting/choosing speakers and sessions, but hey, I'm a developer, there are ways. :)
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.
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.
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 that was left out is what the questions Meetup suggested asking yourself before creating a group.
But yea, this isn't as near big a deal as the poster is making it out to be.
The excerpt from the (apparently edited) Meetup response merely says, "Once a Meetup Group has been removed from the site, it's final."
That doesn't say anything at all about the state of the data. It may just be that they don't want to have to deal with appeals when groups are removed, so their policy is to make all removals final, even if the data are left untouched.
So while I like their service, color me not impressed and please stop spamming us guys.
Your usage pattern unfortunately just happened to look quite a bit like that something that they may think poisons the dynamic (recurring meetups of people with shared interests, not mainly driven by an organizer's self-interest) they are trying to create with the site.
I'm not saying your event was exactly pure self interest or bad in any way, it just isn't something that to them looks healthy for their site. And it doesn't fit the intent of meetup.
The fact that you had a poor description is the final problem here that leaves me feeling little sympathy. Every project, conference, etc. should have a clear description provided by the creator, at least if they want it to be well received. Maybe that's a lesson learned.
FWIW 44Con[1] used Eventbrite[2] (which I'd say is better for one-off events) for the first two years. Eventbrite check-in is awesome, but it's not perfect. This year we're switching to a system we've developed internally and using Eventbrite only for check-in. It's not that Eventbrite isn't good enough, more to do with integration issues, multiple events with different needs and the fees involved to do it all in eventbrite.
I'd still recommend eventbrite for someone wanting to run a one-off event though.
[1] - http://44con.com
Having said that, I've been using Meetup.com for over four years now and I can only say but great things about the service. I used it to create the two largest meetups in Bogota: BogoTech http://www.meetup.com/bogotech/ and BogoDev http://www.bogodev.org/
Even in their terms of service, there's nothing that comes close to banning conferences. The only thing remotely related is that they disallow advertising commercial services.
Far more customizable, better discoverability than EventBrite, but customer service as bad as Meetup's. :)
Add: 'members/?op=csv' to your group root, and you should get a CSV dump of your members (most of what's worth backing up):
meetup.com/YourCoolMeetup/members/?op=csv
"Meetup's mission is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize." [1]
If meetup.com don't want to be used for promoting conferences then they've got every right to shut this down.
The difference is that the latter is organized by Meetup employees. A different set of rules if you work there I guess.
So despite there could being just one false-positive-not-fixed-after-human-contact every 1 million deleted meetups, in Internet that false-positive is likely to bring a lot of undeserved negative attention.
In this case however I think a valid point is being highlighted. False positives do happen but it's concerning that Meetup doesn't seem to have any way of rectifying them e.g. they deleted an event rather than disabling it.
Personally a big fan of Meetup but if this story is accurate and in the event of a false positive, there really is no way of rectifying it, I'd be concerned about using them to organise an event.
>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.
And now I'm left wondering if a email that I sent to a third person a week or so ago wasn't tagged as spam as well. That person has not responded yet, and I'm reverse-engineering in my head if maybe me including two links to Imdb in the said email could have been enough to tag it as spam, or if I finally decide to follow up with a second email and probably making a fool of myself would it be wise to in include the word "spam" in the message, as in "Hey, did you happen to check your Spam folder?"
Like I said, false positives are a bitch, for both users and developers
So how does the company HANDLE false positives? Perhaps they send out a notice which includes contact information and requests specific information be provided for an "appeals" process of some sort (ideal). Perhaps they say "email us if you object" and then mostly maintain radio silence unless you happen to know somebody (Google). Perhaps they delete the data automatically so there is no possible way to recover (maybe Meetup?).
False positives are a problem and I'm not going to get overly upset with a company when a false positive is triggered. But if you pretend that your process is perfect and do not ALLOW for the possibility of false positives, then I have a problem working with you.
I think it'd make more sense to flag it with a delay for permanent deletion.
The takeaway here is don't try to use Meetup to promote your conference.
maybe the sponsored money goes to pay the rent, beers and food so the event can be free, and any money goes to founders/owners
That's what I mean about 'sounds nice and fluffy', actually it means very little in practice.
If it's too much trouble as an "average" user, it's not too hard to find someone who can help.
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.
Sure, for repeat offenders: repeat notifications, then close account, refund adequate part of payment and that's it. You should never irreversibly delete someone's data. Moreover when he's paying you.
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 guidance around how organizers should do things, and Support's main goal is making sure the general members of Meetup aren't preyed upon. You're idea of giving a heads up, what are the parameters around before action is taken? 24 hours? 48 hours? A week? What if this post went "i was on vacation for a week so didn't read the email, and they deleted my group, how could they!!". It wouldn't matter. TOS are TOS.
If this person was malicious how much negative should the community accept? In that time how much spamming of a product the creator is trying to sell happening? How much misleading around the member base is there? You need to deal with these things as quick as possible, and the TOS exists to give people the framework of usage. A violation of a TOS(on any site) is just that, and it needs to be dealt with equally across violations. Support can and will make mistakes. That's human nature. THis isn't one of those. The poster in this case was even told they could re-create the group because at this point the old one is considered poisoned, and not to be trusted. Given Meetup has been doing this for over 10 years now, I'd like to think they have these policies pretty well grounded in reality and experience.
Is the recurring vs one-time distinction (and, more importantly, that one-time meetings are NOT welcome) made clearly? I realize that they say "Meetups are ...." on the help page, but it seems like this group really got screwed.
This meeting was for people who already followed a podcast, as part of a local software development community. There might have been later meet-ups. As long as it is clearly stated what the frequency is, does it matter if the meetups are once a month, once a year, or once a decade? You could still have a passionate community of people who want to use your system to help them organize in-person meetings.
On top of any policy / communication quirks, there should have been technical tools in place to ensure that the organizers' hard work was not lost.