I spent about an hour the other night manually deleting members from my Meetup group. I started the group in 2007, over the time it had accumulated about 200 members. I have since found another way to organize the group, so I decided it would be best to let the members know and delete it.
The group was for BarCamp Nashville and PodCamp Nashville. For some strange reason Meetup kept sending out invites to reoccurring events that were no longer reoccurring.
After a frustrating half an hour searching the site for a delete option I turned to the user forums for answers. As it turns out, this has been a problem since June, 2005. Meetup refuses to delete groups until all members have been manually deleted. It’s a three click and page scroll process to delete one member. I had to repeat that 200 times.
To make matters worse my account was about to expire. I received the following message:
This warning means that should I decide not to pay to host my Meetup, they will allow anyone to take it over. This puts all 200 of my member’s personal information at risk.
I explained my concern about privacy in a couple of emails to Meetup, but their only suggestion was to go ahead and manually delete each member, then they could delete the group. He added, “I’m afraid that’s the only option currently available, but a bulk removal tool is a great suggestion. Thanks! I’ll pass your thoughts on this along to our design and development folks.”
I replied that I find it very difficult to believe that this has been an unsolved issue since 2005. That in fact if someone were to start a Meetup hate group, surely they would shut them down (and delete the group!). A quick search for “KKK” and “jihad” both turned up with no results (thank god).
I am really annoyed with Meetup, I’ve spent well over $300 using their service. For a group owner not to be able to delete his group in a simple way is very wrong, especially considering it’s been a problem since 2005.
I encourage you not to waste your money on Meetup, especially since free services like Facebook are perfect for putting together groups. For special events try Pingg.com, Anyvite.com or Eventbrite, all are awesome RSVP services.
Photo by: Hoggardb
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