Week 1 Release: March 2008

Sadly, if there's a negative comment that most members agree with, there's a good chance it's deserved.

Emphasis on "that most members agree with." I don't want any rotten apples spoiling the bunch - and, no, it's not always obvious it's "deserved," particularly when it's an event the organizer spent a lot of time and energy (and in some cases, his or her own money) on. There's NEVER a chance (good or any other kind of chance) that negative comments are "deserved" in those instances. There just isn't. If anything, I'd like to see a "new feature" that accurately reflects the time and effort invested in a group versus those are that just slapped together in a few minutes.

Hi everyone,

I'm Jesse, I work at Meetup, and my team worked on this, so I'll chime in here.

First, I want to apologize for posting information about this release late. That was a complete oversight and we had no intention of sideswiping you guys with surprise stuff. Will not happen again.

Jesse thanks for the feedback. At least the aknowkegdement is here, as far as it not happening again, we'll seeabout it, that part is up to you..

Ok, let's talk about the Members Comments feature. Hopefully I can clear up a few of your specific comments:

"Another thing that I find really troubling is how, exactly, does this not at some point devolve into disagreements, or people voting not for the comment but for the person who made it?"
No one can see who voted for what, so it shouldn't lead to fights in that way.

"By allowing members to vote on comments, it also allows NEGATIVE comments to "bubble up" to the surface, too." Correct. Our goal was not to have the most favorable comments move to the top necessarily, but the most accurate ones. Sadly, if there's a negative comment that most members agree with, there's a good chance it's deserved. Part of the goal of the project was to give you some additional feedback from your members. (And of course you could still hide any negative comments.)

The one complaint I have about this is, the group may not be 'bad' or 'good', but viewed differently from the majority's perspective. While in alot of cases, may be good, but take these examples:

Let's say I run a group just outside of the city. I do it there particularly because it's where I live, and I want to meet others in that area. It's eveen explained in the group name and the about page. But because we're the only group near the major metro area, members of meetup join the group for their interests. But after a survey a member writes "The drive was far, It's not worth the gas."...............WELL DUH! But the problem is that when more membersjoin from the metro area they'll agree with this, they don't really seem to care why the organizer started the group, they only focus on their needs, and expect the organizer to cater to them.... anyway, my point is, sometimes members don't understand 'the purpose of a group and therefore can't accurately rate a group.

"If they want to learn about my meetups, they can look at my About Us pages!" I agree! Unfortunately, we have a ton of people coming to the Meetup pages who don't take the time to do that. We want to catch their eye and convey the character of your Meetup, and we've learned testimonials and quotes from the members is one of the most effective ways to do that - which is why we changed it from showing one quote to three.

Can we see what research or how you learned this? Saying is one thing showing is another

After two years of enduring many mindless, sometimes harmful, occasionally good, yet mostly un-announced "upgrades", I have learned that one of the most amusing parts of being an organizer is watching the crowd of paying Organizers ROAR at every "upgrade". It is astonishing how Meetup continues time and time again to spend valuable development time irritating its paying customers.

By the way... Thumbs down on your latest "upgrade"... This silly change surely diverted resources from what many of us want dearly.. A WAIT LIST.

Hey everyone again,

I won't comment on larger issues of what we're working on in general, but I will mention that this project specifically did not divert vast amounts of resources away from anything. Now that we have weekly releases, we are able to launch more small, quick projects.

Secondly, we listened to all the feedback here and are changing the feature. We're not reverting it 100%, because we still believe that the voting can be an effective way to surface the most compelling comments both on your home pages and throughout the site. However, we understand the concern about clutter and confusion on your Meetups' home pages, so we're removing the voting there - so you can only vote on the All Comments page.

There are some other tweaks but that's the gist of it. When we launch I will fill in the details.

Thanks,
Jesse

So you'll be able to vote on the All Comments page which will help cycle comments to the main page? I think that's probably a good idea, because I found that having the links on the front page do clutter things up.

I can see the usefulness in having 3 comments instead of 1 because it gives people more of an idea of what people think of the group. Most reviewing sites (Citysearch, Menupages, etc.) feature more than 1 comment on each entry. My major worry, though, is the lack of web "real estate" on that front page.

The more stuff that is loaded on, the less people are likely to scroll down to see what the next event is, which in many instances may be at least as important in making an impression as the comments.

Is it at all possible to make the event description come up on that front page without having to scroll down?

Has anyone considered what they're asking of meetup and the amount of time it takes to work on these projects? I'm sorry I hate to disagree with people here, but my husband works in IT, and I know how much work it is just to get one upgrade done for his company. You have a whole process you have to go through and it's not as simple as clicking a button.

I, too, work in IT and can attest to how much time, frustration and effort goes into planning, testing and getting sign-off from management and various teams that have a stake in the outcome before implementing technical changes that may affect clients' productivity and usability. There are also challenges on how and when to communicate those changes to clients. Sometimes IT misses the mark and don't communicate to clients in a timely manner and IT ends up getting burned -- clients remember more of the bad instead of the good things we do. As a result of several cycles of IT wreaking havoc (costing the company $$$, client downtime and dissatisfaction) -- a Change Release Management Board was formed to have IT folks and client representatives to review major changes that will affect the infrastructure and functionalty before same are implemented along with providing detailed justification and the associated risks for those changes. It is not perfect, but it keeps us from doing more harm, than good.

I also understand where meetup.com is coming from when they throw tidbits our way to try to appease us. In the bigger scheme of things, it's not going to fly because the angry mob has spoken time and time again...and by making these types of user-interface changes without first communicating them to the organizers is causing the angry mob swell up, come out with their pitchforks and torches to go after the town villian. I'd much rather see meetup.com as an empathetic hero :)


REMEMBER GOOGLE'S MOTTO: Do No Evil.....

....just my .02 cents worth.

Yes, it has, Len.

We used that section to announce features in the past, one instance that comes to mind readily is when we launched mailing lists.

I'm sorry you're feeling this frustration, and we've acknowledged your concerns about being better prepared for new features.

We appreciate your feedback and we hope that you'll understand that we're working to make this a smoother process in the future.

Thanks again for this feedback.


Lucette

I probably missed that one in the PANIC caused by turning OFF all the message boards for every group!
Your exception actually proves the rule. What you didn't announce then was the terrible deleterious effect that would have on our groups.

Len

Hey everyone again,

I won't comment on larger issues of what we're working on in general, but I will mention that this project specifically did not divert vast amounts of resources away from anything. Now that we have weekly releases, we are able to launch more small, quick projects.

Secondly, we listened to all the feedback here and are changing the feature. We're not reverting it 100%, because we still believe that the voting can be an effective way to surface the most compelling comments both on your home pages and throughout the site. However, we understand the concern about clutter and confusion on your Meetups' home pages, so we're removing the voting there - so you can only vote on the All Comments page.

There are some other tweaks but that's the gist of it. When we launch I will fill in the details.

Thanks,
Jesse

Thanks Jesse-
Thanks for really listening, as you said you would. I still see thumbs on my welcome page, but I trust you to make them less/in visible.

As for not commenting on larger issues of what you're working on, we really wish you would. Really. That's the type of communication we want.

I'll keep saying this; tell us AHEAD of time what you're going to spring on us. Test it with some Orgs.. and save yourself the kind of hair-pulling that went on yesterday.

KarenL <-hopeful

Karen: we have not pushed the tweaks that Jesse mentioned yet. They should go up in a few hours after our QA dept has had a chance to sign off on them

Len: definitely not worth getting into this with you (and I am *not* starting a conversation about this), but we *never* turned off message boards for any group that had them enabled.