An alternative strategy for arranging the first meetup in your area is to state flatly that you'll be in a certain place between certain hours, with a book to read in case no-one shows up. You signal commitment and what have you got to lose?
That's what I did, but then two people said they would be available a couple of weeks afterwards, so I rescheduled anyway. I'm just saying enquiring about interest first might be more optimal in some cases (though I would recommend still fixing a time and place if no-one shows interest).
There seem to here have been a fair amount of meetups posted with no times, and then re-posted with added times or slightly adjusted wording. Perhaps Google Reader is the problem (how I follow the top-level), but not only are there a lot of meetups (which has been talked about quite a bit lately), but these changed post titles show up as two separate entities. (Example)
For planners, please think carefully when announcing your meetup and post the time and the title you want on the first try, if possible. Thanks.
Perhaps a standard title format could be proposed that handled such things?
Or something like that? This would have the benefit of helping planners not forget anything important, but might have the added benefit that if a future implementation of some sort makes a meetup page or auto-scraped list of happenings, a standard format will make this easier.