in reply to Re: Meetup with other Perl folks in your area (perl.meetup.com)
in thread Meetup with other Perl folks in your area (perl.meetup.com)
I have had a bad experience with meetup.com, as I am also a noder on E2. Looking forward to meeting up with some fellow noders in London, I arranged to go to the E2 meetup scheduled for Saturday 3rd August at 5:00 pm. I turned up at the venue (Pages Bar in Victoria) (albeit 20 minutes late) to find that another group had booked the venue, and were charging an admission. I walked away and found a different pub.
Apparently there were 2 E2 noders who did find each other having paid the admission. I have since met up with Brit noders, who seem to have quite a good grape vine. Their verdict was also a distinct thumbs down for meetup.com.
Here are my criticisms of meetup.com:
- They are promising the Earth and delivering very little. Geeks of the world unite seems to be the message.
- The meeting on a given subject (Perlmonks, Slashdot, Buffy, E2, etc.) is always synchronised to the same date globally. Why? IMO this means that inevitably fewer people will be available to attend.
- The venue list (certainly for London at any rate) is piss poor. I have pointed the meetup.com help desk in the direction of Grub Street also saying that many of the venues I can give a personal report on as to suitability.
- When it comes to venue voting, you only get a choice of a random 3. There is no "none of these" category. I did look at a homebrewers meetup for London, but they did not offer a real ale pub.
The existing mechanisms of discussion forums (e.g. PM), mailing lists and IRC work better than a meta meetup site and a collection of mail bots.