[Robotgroup] Meetup RSVPs - Thanks

[Bryan Bishop]

On Thursday 10 July 2008, Robert Carter wrote:
> 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?

Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Yes, that would look spammy. There's another 
option -- just sending a private message via meetup's internal system, 
which would really just send an email or "PM" or whatever, which 
wouldn't be accessible to anybody but that user that we send it to.

> 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.

1) Append all messages posted to meetup with silly headers/footers 
advertizing the actual mailing list.

2) Run a script to monitor for those people that are posting on the 
meetup site and then have somebody go say hi to them to tell them about 
how things really work.

3) Blah, this is too much annoying/hacky work. Meetup isn't designed to 
be accomodating to offsite-based groups. Let's just stick with the 
greetings?

- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/
Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html
irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap
"Genius is the ability to escape the human condition;
Humanity is the need to escape." -- Q. Uim