Here’s another proposal for dealing with meetups: some sort of prominent widget that will show (only upcoming) meetups in chronological order, with links:
And what happens when we have a regular weekly or monthly meetup in every English-speaking city of more than two million? I’ve noticed that the regular meetups (LW/NYC, LW/Bay Area, LW/London, et cetera) don’t bother to announce every meeting. New users have to know to look at the wiki page.
Maybe this proposed widget should include these regular meetups (with links to the relevant wiki page) for all events within the next three weeks.
The most straightforward way to have this would be to have a new database table with the following fields: date, location, and hyperlink. A set of trusted users (including one or two from each regular group) could add, edit, or delete records. Periodically, records with dates more one day in the past will be automatically purged.
There’s no need to automate this, since maintaining it takes a small amount of effort relative to the effort of organizing the meetup.
Address the “meet-up announcement overload” problem on the promoted feed.
See:
1) Meetup posts as discussion threads, please
2) Move meetups to the sidebar?
3) Do meetups really have to go on the front page?
4) Meta: Meetup Section of the Site
Here’s another proposal for dealing with meetups: some sort of prominent widget that will show (only upcoming) meetups in chronological order, with links:
Upcoming Meetups
Thu, April 21 — Cambridge, MA, US
Fri, April 22 — Pittsburgh, PA, US
Sat, April 23 — Austin, TX, US
Mon, April 25 — New York, NY, US
Tue, April 26 — New York, NY, US
Wed, April 27 — Berkeley, CA, US
Thu, April 28 — New York, NY, US
Thu, April 28 — Mountain View, CA, US
Sat, April 30 — Shanghai, CN
Sat, April 30 — Paris, FR
Sun, May 1 — London, UK
Sun, May 1 — Cambridge, MA, US
Wed, May 4 — Research Triangle, NC, US
Wed, May 4 — Berkeley, CA, US
Thu, May 5 — Mountain View, CA, US
Fri, May 6 — Melbourne, AU
Wed May 11 — Berkeley, CA, US
Thu, May 12 — Mountain View, CA, US
Sun, May 15 — Cambridge, MA, US
And what happens when we have a regular weekly or monthly meetup in every English-speaking city of more than two million? I’ve noticed that the regular meetups (LW/NYC, LW/Bay Area, LW/London, et cetera) don’t bother to announce every meeting. New users have to know to look at the wiki page.
Maybe this proposed widget should include these regular meetups (with links to the relevant wiki page) for all events within the next three weeks.
Do geolocation or enter a postal code, and see only the ones nearby?
Edit—please disregard this post
I don’t trust geolocation.
Also, there’s an advantage in a new user seeing all the meetups, since it accurately tells them how active we are.
And what about people who travel a lot and might check out a meetup in another city if they were reminded about it?
Geolocation usually works. The cost of a miss is low.
If the user had defined their location in their user profile, we’d use that instead.
This would be better if it also used geocoding based on IP address to filter so it shows only nearby groups by default.
The most straightforward way to have this would be to have a new database table with the following fields: date, location, and hyperlink. A set of trusted users (including one or two from each regular group) could add, edit, or delete records. Periodically, records with dates more one day in the past will be automatically purged.
There’s no need to automate this, since maintaining it takes a small amount of effort relative to the effort of organizing the meetup.
I also posted about this a while ago. My recommendation is that there be a user preference menu shown when signing up (and editable later):
-=Menu=-
[ ] Show all upcoming meetups
[ ] Show only meetups in my area (reveals form for inputting area)
[ ] Don’t show upcoming meetups
I’d be willing to code up a meetup-calendar site, though:
it’d take me a long time to get done
I’d need the ability to authenticate LW accounts (could have separate ones, but that’s annoying for users)
What are the odds I could make something nontrivially integratable into LW’s hosting?