New Feature Release for Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Hey everyone! We've got a new feature for you today and some related fixes along with it.

Schedule Meetups more easily

The page where Organizers schedule their Meetups is an essential page on the site, on which you choose from dozens of Meetup's event-related features. But it's also perhaps our most complicated page (and slowest to load), and can be overwhelming to new Organizers. So we've streamlined the whole page. We've found through feedback and testing that it's now generally clearer and easier to use. We also optimized our code to make the page load faster.

The features on the page are now grouped into clear sections, each of which you can collapse or expand. With the sections collapsed, it's easier to scan the page and see the different parts quickly. If you prefer all the sections expanded, click on "Expand all" - and you can even save your preference for the page to always be expanded.




We fixed up a few other related things as well, based on your requests:

• Easy button to add photos into the event description.
  
• Higher character limits for the description and "How will members find you there?"
  
• Formatting in your description (colors, etc) now carries over when you click through to email your Meetup Group.
  
• Fixed some missing data issues when you go back and edit a Meetup.
  

Let us know your feedback, and look for more features relating to scheduling Meetups coming soon!

Thanks,
Jesse

Nice to see that some of the negative feedback was eventually taken on board despite the hard fought battle to get the point across.

Len

Hi Jesse

these are really great improvements! - especially love the fact that the format is now carried over the email, the extra characters in description and how will members find you there, the newly added button to add photos

a few suggestions:

- many times, when you create an event and get to the email, the venue appears as NOT CHOSEN YET, even though it WAS chosen

- need some more characters in event title sometimes

- desperately need a PREVIEW for event page, currently there is a page that shows event content before emailing people but is not a real preview - we would like to see exactly how event looks like before we finish editing

- same happens with DRAFTS: it would be lovely to have a preview, and to have the option to KEEP a draft copy in the draft tab after event is published. If I have a template saved, I lose it every time I publish an event, as a copy of it is not kept after I publish it

thanks!!

Nestor

After opening one of the sections in Firefox 3.6a1 (it's not 3.5! it's trunk nightlies!), clicking the others just makes the word 'edit' disappear and reappear.

So far, I like the new upgrade.

Thanks for getting rid of the quote from the organizer of the hiking meetup that reccommended me to charge my members a fee for meetups. I am sooo Glad to see that go!! Was getting pretty tired of it.

I will play around with new format and see how it works!

I'd love to have a "Copy this Meeting" option that work across Meetup groups. For example, I am the assistant-organizer on 4 different Meetup groups, and sometimes we like to do cooperative events. If the organizer posts the event in one group, it'd be great if I could go to that entry, click a "Copy this Meeting" button which pops up a drag-down menu listing all my Meetup groups (or at least the ones I'm an organizer or assistant on) so that I can click on the group I want the meeting copied to, and just like that have it "paste" to that other meetup's calendar. Rather than having to copy everything by hand from one Meetup to the other.

these are really great improvements! - especially love the fact that the format is now carried over the email, the extra characters in description and how will members find you there, the newly added button to add photos

a few suggestions:

- many times, when you create an event and get to the email, the venue appears as NOT CHOSEN YET, even though it WAS chosen

- need some more characters in event title sometimes

- desperately need a PREVIEW for event page, currently there is a page that shows event content before emailing people but is not a real preview - we would like to see exactly how event looks like before we finish editing

- same happens with DRAFTS: it would be lovely to have a preview, and to have the option to KEEP a draft copy in the draft tab after event is published. If I have a template saved, I lose it every time I publish an event, as a copy of it is not kept after I publish it

Hey Nestor - a few answers:

• Venue to email bug should be fixed now. Let us know if you see it again.
  
• We're working on an event preview!
  
• Drafts: If you're on the draft page in the calendar, and hit "Copy" you can schedule a new Meetup but keep the original in the drafts folder.
  

After opening one of the sections in Firefox 3.6a1 (it's not 3.5! it's trunk nightlies!), clicking the others just makes the word 'edit' disappear and reappear.

Thanks for the heads up Tom. We don't officially support nightly builds of Firefox , but we will check this out.

Thanks again!

I'd love to have a "Copy this Meeting" option that work across Meetup groups. For example, I am the assistant-organizer on 4 different Meetup groups, and sometimes we like to do cooperative events. If the organizer posts the event in one group, it'd be great if I could go to that entry, click a "Copy this Meeting" button which pops up a drag-down menu listing all my Meetup groups (or at least the ones I'm an organizer or assistant on) so that I can click on the group I want the meeting copied to, and just like that have it "paste" to that other meetup's calendar. Rather than having to copy everything by hand from one Meetup to the other.

The "event across multiple meetup groups" problem is one I've run into more than a few times myself - does anyone know if there's already a thread or two started somewhere about this, or discussion around a future release to address that dilemma?

Here ya go Derek:

Copying
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