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Meetup: Somewhere you do not live even close to
Six out of the last 10 posts are about single meetups. And I care about none of them.
I will look into whipping together some kind of bot that periodically posts threads like the open thread or a meetup thread. Voice your opinion in the comments if you do not want me to do that.
That is all.
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Comments (24)
Maybe there should a third section of the site "Meetups" besides "Main" and "Discussion".
Meh. Most likely, significantly less people would look at that section ("because hey, meetups in my area are rare"), so more people would miss meetup notices.
In effect, the current system forces people to see meetup announcements whether they want to or not, which is rude but good for meetup participation.
I would be more in favour of a place in the options where you could put select for which areas you want to show/hide meetups, with a default showing all of them (savvy users who know where to find the option would be less likely to be unaware of meetups they could attend).
Or, since we're working off the reddit codebase (though a fork from quite a few years ago), this could be implemented by having a subreddit per geographical region, and an option for only subscribing to some subreddits (which would default to "all").
(I'm not very fond of fragmenting the site though, and all these solutions seem pretty dev-intensive)
The problem of attention could easily be solved. No need to have a seperate 'Meetup' section. Use the discussion section, but just have a single thread and put all the meetup areas together in the title. So that instead of the current way, which is:
We'd just have:
Then the details of each individual meetup could be written down in the comments. This way would probably get even more attention, because of the reduced clutter.
Isn't that kind of what the OP is proposing?
Yes, with the inclusion of all the locations in the title itself so as to prevent potential attendees from missing out.
This also has the advantage of needing no new code.
It does need new code. For aggregate threads to work, meetup organizers have to coordinate with whoever is posting them. I don't think that will happen without automation.
If my suggestion were to be adopted, I hereby volunteer to coordinate the meetup threads; it's worth it if only to get the annoying and distracting meetup posts out of Discussion.
It doesn't need to change the site code, and that's dicier than just someone cooking up a bot.
As far as forcing people to see meetup notices I think the "NEAREST MEETUPS" sidebar does that job quite well.
I tend to not notice it. Perhaps it needs a larger font.
Except that my eyes automatically glide over anything that says Meetup: X, which is not an uncommon method of dealing with frequent distractions (also see: internet ads. Some people need to block them, others like me literally don't notice them most of the time)
Well, currently, the sidebar displays "recent posts" and "recent discussion." If it also displayed "recent meetups" separately, people would continue to get notice of meetups without them cluttering the discussion section.
Concerns about programming effort and fragmenting the site still apply.
It already displays "nearest meetups"? (Maybe you need to have your location set in order to see that section.)
Yes! Please!
If that's just because you don't live near any of them, there's an easy way to change 0/6 to 1/7....
(Incidentally, even though I don't live even close to MA, it still generated fuzzies to see a CoZE meetup happening, so I care about 1/6.)
The "Add new meetup" button automatically creates a discussion post, in addition to posting to /meetups (which already exists).
When I used to actually read this site, this annoyed me too, so I'd be fine with removing that "feature".
I like your plan, but I think you'll have to write something first and demonstrate that it works well enough for it to be accepted. This place overfloweth with perfectionism.
If there is a settled policy on open threads, maybe they should be created by a bot. But it seems to be working fine, in part because people can (and do) create one at the right time simply because they want to post in one.
But you are simultaneously suggesting a new meetup policy and automating it. If there is a need for a new policy, that's a pretty good reason not to automate it.
There used to be a system of posts with multiple meetups, much like passive fist describes. Those were simple reminders for well established meetups. New meetups do need advertising, both for new members and because they usually don't start with regular schedules. Added: this is stilling going on, run by Frank Adamek, so the proposal seems moot. Instead, the question is how to get people to work with Frank (if not continue their current system).
I think the best solution to this is an option for meetup posts to recur automatically at some frequency. My crude hack for the Austin meetup keeps us on the map, on the sidebar, and out of the discussion section- this should be something everyone can do easily.
A solution which does not put meetups on the map and on the Nearest Meetups sidebar strikes me as a strongly suboptimal solution. It's not obvious to me that we need a third reddit for meetups.
This does not work for meetup groups that have a different topic every time, like ours does. I'm going to ask the group whether they think this is a good idea, but membership is getting a bit poorer and it might still impact that.
I've edited the Austin meetup post to change the topic, like I've edited the post to change the date- having the date automatically adjust should work out for your situation as well. (It'll still require constant work on your part- but no more so than making a new meetup post every time.)
Do you actually need to make a separate top-level post for the meetup to appear in the sidebar or on the map? I thought there was a separate mechanism for that.