Meetup.com kills Vim London without warning

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

* 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!"