I've filled in my location, but the community section currently shows some events that I'd never want to go to such as a random meetup in LA (I'm in Australia). It would be nice if it only showed events I might reasonably travel to, such as local events or major events (ie. EA Global, AI Summer Fellows Program, ect.)
Yeah. Agreed that that is not great, but fine-tuning that is going to be moderately complex project. Much of the problem will hopefully go away as more meetups start listing themselves on LW (i.e. right now there's just one meetup listed per city in most places, so if you're not near a major hub you'll mostly see far away things).
We do plan to implement a 1000-mile limit (so that at the very least you shouldn't be seeing things on other continents). We considered a much shorter one, but people living in, say, the American midwest might then not see anything at all, and it might well be worth it to them to take a major trip out to NYC or the Bay or what-have-you)
We recently updated the frontpage to show upcoming meetups in the community section. This is another small piecewise update towards a fully featured frontpage meetup section.
Current implementation:
If you're not logged in, it shows upcoming events, sorted by karma.
If you're logged in, you now have the option of updating your account settings to have a location. If you've done so, the meetups/events on the frontpage will instead be "closest upcoming events."
If you've set your location, this will also affect which events listed on the community page.
Some obvious things to do which we haven't done yet:
/meetups
One additional update was make "lesswrong.com/meetups" also go to the community page, which this is where some older links were directed to.