blacktar

I have a project where this would be useful. I can haz? :)

l33t h4xx0r. Server down. Sorry, guys. I'll go investigate what's wrong. Update: Server back up and running. Sorry for the momentary inconvenience.

No worries! I'd love to know more about the dangers of solving your own problem becoming an obsession, how to identify it and knowing when to quit or press on.

I like the design and the ux. Task management is a pain in the backside and I'm still searching for something that will actually work for me, for both my personal to-dos and the organizations and groups that I help manage. I do agree with jeffclark that it would be a great improvement to better communicate the pain it solves and who it's for like smack bang at the top of the frontpage e.g. "Awesome task distribution for teams" or something. And getting rid of the about in PDF form and make it html instead would probably also be a good thing.

And we're back in control at the original meetup.com group.

Guys, thanks for your support and thanks to the guys at meetup.com com for handing the group back to the community.

meetup.com has a 36h reply policy and to their credit, they did get back to us well within that trime frame now and we're now working to have the group restored.

We are also in touch with the dev people at meetup.com voicing our concerns about the ease of automated group scavenging. ;)

Update: Meetup.com support finally got back to me and is now working to restore the group, fully or in part depending on the damage done. Before we rush to conclusions, please consider that no decision has been made to continuing using meetup.com as the community platform. That's up to you to decide at the next meetup. As Apple says, "We like to have options". ;)

And it's gone. http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News-Cologne/ == "The Meetup Group you're looking for doesn't exist."

This just in. The name of the hijacked group is now "Hacker News - Deleting - Documented extreme libel by members" and the "Meredith" character has removed their profile image.

Keep calm and carry on.

And it has now been renamed again to "Cologne Startups".

We'll keep you posted what the community decides on using instead in our next meetup.

It would be cool if everybody who posted the URL to the previous Hacker News Cologne meetup.com group on their blogs or profiles would update it to http://hncgn.org and help reach out to everybody informing them of the change. Thanks!

First thing I did was to save the members list. :) I've already reached out to 99% percent of the members but we still need everybody's help getting the word out: http://hncgn.org

Let's get everybody to leave the meetup.com group.

For HNCGN people stumbling on this thread, I've posted an official announcement of the next and 11th Hacker News Meetup Cologne http://stopmebeforeiblogagain.com/hacker-news-cologne-meetup...

And now I was removed too. Yay.

I don't see why someone would use their admin privileges to downvote this thread, though. Maybe just the effect of falling off the front page? We had no intentions of making this public ourselves (as to avoid feeding the troll) and we're just trying to get our perspective of the situation across now that the cat is out of the bag here.

Were there any further messages or mails sent from the new "organizer"?

I noticed. What do you think caused the drop?

It seems there was a concerted effort to take over the meetup.com group where the hijacker joined with two profiles in two steps with a clear intent of a hostile takeover.

First they joined with one (profile X) to listen in, then a second (profile Y) with the same name when the group was about to expire. Then profile Y "stepped up" to take over the group and delegated org status to profile X too.

They then later removed profile X completely, leaving only Y (all the time profile X and Y identically named, identically looking) as the organizer.

The timing of the events as observed seem to support this thesis.

(Update). Doing some testing, we also found it quite easy to find expiring meetup.com groups in public, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22This+Meetup+no+longer+has...

I hope we can all refrain from personally attacking this person. Let's keep it nice and clean. No need to escalate.

Yes, the group name was changed from "Hacker News Cologne Meetup" by the new unsolicited "organizer".

Yes, it's true.

From the http://www.meetup.com/terms/

3.3 Meetup Group Fees;

[...](3) Meetup Groups. Organizers who allow their Basic Group Fee Subscription to lapse are subject to removal as the Organizer of the Meetup Group that they lead, and their Meetup Group may be terminated or transferred to another Organizer. [...]

The backstory is that I, Vidar Andersen, the original initiator of the Cologne meetup - initially make a mistake.

I made a mistake in not updating my payment details before my credit card expired earlier this year. Meetup.com then automatically stepped me down as an organizer and mailed the group that I had stepped down as an organizer. IMO that's a pretty lame way of doing business, but hey, it's their business and not mine. Apparently it works for them.

Then I tried to update my payment details with new credit card details to no avail. It just wasn't possible to make meetup.com accept any new credit card for me anymore. I was only getting error messages. I then contacted Meetup.com and notified them about the situation.

At that same time, I asked co-organizer Francis to and add a credit card to automatically take over as organizer for me and reinstate my organizer status. Said. Done. Problem solved, right? Not so fast.

In the meantime, meetup.com got back to me and revoked Francis' status and gave the organizer status back to me with a kind offer of an extended new grace period as organizer to sort the payment issue out. Meanwhile, I was still unable to update my payment details and add any new credit card credentials without getting error messages and I notified Meetup.com of this. I have still yet to hear back from them on that.

It's worth noting that had meetup.com just left it as it were with Francis' payment details as the organizer, we wouldn't have been in this predicament in the first place.

Yesterday when the group had yet to expire and I had yet to hear back from meetup.com on my latest issue report, the Hacker News Cologne Meetup group was taken over by an unknown individual. Or in meetup.com's parlance, someone "stepped up to be the organizer" of the group.

I immediately reached out to this person informing them of the payment issue situation, thanking them for stepping up but informing them that it was neither needed or wanted, offering to resolve the ownership issue amicably and in private as soon as possible. I never heard back.

In stead I woke up to what now seems to be a blatant attempt to aggressively acquire customers for their event(s). The name, logo and purpose of the group had been changed to something completely different.

Then mass mailings started to arrive from the person who had taken over our group accusing, us the real organizers, of lying and trying to change the group [back to the original state]. Needless to say, we do not agree.

As I scrambled to counter the accusations and inform the group's members, we the original organizers were getting our organizer status removed from this individual. We were also barred from mailing to the group without censorship and approval by the same individual. Needless to say, those messages did not come through to the group. Then I posted the same messages to the group's message boards, just to find the hijacker removing the boards altogether. In a matter of minutes we were effectively shut out, unable to communicate with the community over meetup.com.

So that's where we're at right now. We the original Hacker News Cologne Meetup organizers are completely out of control of our own community platform on meetup.com. We've filed a complaint with meetup.com to resolve the situation and it is still pending a reply. And yes, we do appreciate the sweet irony of a hacker group hacked as we move on.

We apologize for the intermission and it's now back to business as usual: We'll meet up again on schedule with two awesome new speakers lined up for you at SolutionSpace, November 28th 1900 CET.

This time we are relying on you instead of meetup.com to get the word out. You know what to do.

Hi, Vidar, the original co-organizer here. We're on top of the situation and will be announcing the next Hacker News Meetup Cologne tomorrow. In the meantime, it would be cool if everybody refrains from personal attacks on Meredith. It seems she's a real person. Let's keep it nice and clean.

Great insights! I think that's a very real problem. Do you think it is impossible to crowd fund a social / utility based app for the iPhone in general, or do you see a way to heighten the probability of a success?

Well, that's where we probably have to agree to disagree. I don't think the users of Instagram woke up and said "Holy crap, how am I going to save and share images today" either. ;)

No, not at all. No worries. :) I only wanted to be very clear about the reasons and sources of our assumption that there is indeed interest.

Thanks for the constructive feedback. We think we do have somewhat of a grip and significant feedback on what the pain point is that we were trying to solve: Shooting and sharing good videos with your mobile phone is hard and a lot of hassle and OneSec aimed to change all that. I do think we failed spectacularly to communicate that, though.