I might as well point out my solution- I’ve set the date of the Austin meetup to be six years from now, and edit the date each week. It stays on the map, it stays on the sidebar (so I remember to edit the date- if this were automatic, then it could be correct), and it stays out of discussion.
This issue has been brought up many times, and I agree that it’s a major problem. The solution I suggested was to have all the meetup locations be brought together into a single weekly meetup thread, with all the city names in the title. This could be done either automatically with a little bit of coding, or by just having someone do the coordination. I even volunteered to be the one doing the coordinating. But no one seemed to be interested in actually agreeing to do it. I still stand by my suggestion, if it is adopted.
It seems to me that the forum format is ill suited for the subject matter in the first place. Unless the intent is to use the discussion forum raise awareness of the meetups, it seems to me that a website specifically designed for the meetups would make more sense. Especially since most people aren’t going to have much interest in a meetup more than, say, 100 miles away from where they live. If people really want to be notified about the meetups without having to go to a separate website, couldn’t that be accomplished through an RSS feed or some such solution? Granted, that would take more effort on individual LWers, but I have doubts about how much clutter should be accepted simply to make becoming aware of every meetup as effortless as possible.
Is there a way on my end to tell my computer to not include any post that includes “Meetup” in the title?
Frank Adamek has done what you suggest for years. That you don’t notice it being done is a pretty bad sign about the idea. If you want to contribute, you should be trying to get people to use his system, rather than trying to introduce a new system. Or maybe you should suggest modifications. But the first step is knowing the current system.
I’m aware of Frank’s posts to main. It came up during the last discussion about this idea. What I am suggesting is to remove the individual meetup threads from discussion, to clear up the clutter. In addition, the meetup cities would be right up there in the title (to respond to objections that having a single thread would result in reduced visibility). Instead of everyone submitting to discussion and then someone gathering up everything in main, everyone would simply submit to the person doing the coordinating. The reason I proposed myself as a volunteer was that I didn’t know if Frank would be willing to do this, given that it would require daily correspondence with the people organizing the meetups.
I’m not sure how much of the difference is more activity. It feels like a higher proportion of things I’m interested in, but that could just be more frequency of things I’m interested in.
… and of those five, for two of them the comments consist of me complaining that the meetup location hasn’t been included in the title.
That being said, personally I don’t mind the meetup posts that much, and I’m not sure that moving them to their own section would be an improvement. I find it pretty likely that nobody would ever look there.
Next iteration: meetup announcements occupy their own tab, top of Discussion starts with an “ad” line about recent announcements, in a bright color or otherwise distinguished: “Recent meetup announcements: Moscow, Tel-Avid, Boulder, London”, every city is a link.
That policy forces everybody to see the meetup announcements, and thus probably increases meetup attendance (and knowing your announcement will have a wide (forced) public encourages people to create meetups).
A full half (20/40) of the posts currently under discussion are meetup threads.
Can we please segregate these threads to another forum tab (in the vein of the Main/Discussion split)?
Edit: And only 5 or so of them actually have any comments in them.
I might as well point out my solution- I’ve set the date of the Austin meetup to be six years from now, and edit the date each week. It stays on the map, it stays on the sidebar (so I remember to edit the date- if this were automatic, then it could be correct), and it stays out of discussion.
This issue has been brought up many times, and I agree that it’s a major problem. The solution I suggested was to have all the meetup locations be brought together into a single weekly meetup thread, with all the city names in the title. This could be done either automatically with a little bit of coding, or by just having someone do the coordination. I even volunteered to be the one doing the coordinating. But no one seemed to be interested in actually agreeing to do it. I still stand by my suggestion, if it is adopted.
It seems to me that the forum format is ill suited for the subject matter in the first place. Unless the intent is to use the discussion forum raise awareness of the meetups, it seems to me that a website specifically designed for the meetups would make more sense. Especially since most people aren’t going to have much interest in a meetup more than, say, 100 miles away from where they live. If people really want to be notified about the meetups without having to go to a separate website, couldn’t that be accomplished through an RSS feed or some such solution? Granted, that would take more effort on individual LWers, but I have doubts about how much clutter should be accepted simply to make becoming aware of every meetup as effortless as possible.
Is there a way on my end to tell my computer to not include any post that includes “Meetup” in the title?
I think it works to have meet-ups on this site rather than in a separate blog, but they shouldn’t be separate posts in discussion.
Frank Adamek has done what you suggest for years. That you don’t notice it being done is a pretty bad sign about the idea. If you want to contribute, you should be trying to get people to use his system, rather than trying to introduce a new system. Or maybe you should suggest modifications. But the first step is knowing the current system.
I’m aware of Frank’s posts to main. It came up during the last discussion about this idea. What I am suggesting is to remove the individual meetup threads from discussion, to clear up the clutter. In addition, the meetup cities would be right up there in the title (to respond to objections that having a single thread would result in reduced visibility). Instead of everyone submitting to discussion and then someone gathering up everything in main, everyone would simply submit to the person doing the coordinating. The reason I proposed myself as a volunteer was that I didn’t know if Frank would be willing to do this, given that it would require daily correspondence with the people organizing the meetups.
I don’t know how typical I am, but I check Discussion at lot more often than Main.
That’s because Discussion has a lot more activity, right?
I’m not sure how much of the difference is more activity. It feels like a higher proportion of things I’m interested in, but that could just be more frequency of things I’m interested in.
Yes I think the proposed aggregated meetup threads should be in discussion.
… and of those five, for two of them the comments consist of me complaining that the meetup location hasn’t been included in the title.
That being said, personally I don’t mind the meetup posts that much, and I’m not sure that moving them to their own section would be an improvement. I find it pretty likely that nobody would ever look there.
Next iteration: meetup announcements occupy their own tab, top of Discussion starts with an “ad” line about recent announcements, in a bright color or otherwise distinguished: “Recent meetup announcements: Moscow, Tel-Avid, Boulder, London”, every city is a link.
If true, what should we infer about the policy of having them cluttering up Discussion?
That policy forces everybody to see the meetup announcements, and thus probably increases meetup attendance (and knowing your announcement will have a wide (forced) public encourages people to create meetups).
No, it doesn’t. Partially because of the meetup clutter I don’t look at the posts page at all and just go straight into comments.
And what is the cost-benefit analysis for forcing everyone to read about meetups all over the globe?