[Robotgroup] Meetup RSVPs - Thanks

[Robert Carter]

On Jul 10, 2008, at 2:51 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:

> We can automate that. It's a simple perl script, or hell even a wget
> call through bash that would do a POST to the proper form with the
> right authentication keys. I should know :). I was doing something  
> like
> this a while back on twitter for automatically following a large  
> number
> of people at once, and there's a line for username/login. Let's see if
> I can't do this for you ..


Thanks Bryan. (Yes, we are in fact getting some good new people  
through Meetup!)

I'm not sure if the automated greeting is a good idea-- on TRG's  
Meetup home page, there's a section called "What's new?" that shows  
recent activity, which includes all the people who have recently  
joined. Back when I was sending out greeting messages (or "shouts",  
as Meetup sometimes calls them) I noticed that everything I sent  
appeared in the "What's new?" section. If we had an automated  
greeting, our home page would have a list of the new members and each  
one would be accompanied by the same welcome message, which might  
look kinda "spammy"-- I dunno, maybe I'm just overly sensitive to  
stuff like that. What do the rest of you think?

The same thing would happen if we copy the mailing list to the Meetup  
message board (these posts appear in the What's new? section as  
well). But actually, that would solve the problem of the multiple  
spammy-looking greetings on our home page, because they'd get quickly  
bumped off by all the new messages. The difficulty here is that a  
Meetup member might reply to a message on the Meetup message board,  
but that reply would never go to the list so no one would see it, and  
the person would be left wondering "how come they're ignoring that  
reply I posted?" or something. But yeah, maybe if we could link from  
a Meetup page to the mailing list archives, it would give the new  
members a chance to get a sense of what goes on here.

-- Robert