Meetup.com kills Vim London without warning

Organizing a meetup and then using the first meeting to promote your own commercial product is bound to raise some flags at meetup.org. And I'm really glad it does, otherwise we'd be inundated with meetup spam as every product launch creates a group on meetup.org for the free publicity.<p>I really like Drew Neil's work on vimcasts, but he goofed here and didn't really think it through. I suspect that if he resubmits the group without the personal promotion everything will go fine. As far as I can tell, they didn't kick a pre-existing group, but rather turned down the request for a new group.

This was a mistake on our part. We're reaching out and rectifying things now. Sorry guys.

I'm going to make a plug for Calagator here. <a href="https://github.com/calagator/calagator" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/calagator/calagator</a><p>Calagator is an open-source community calendar project created for the tech community in Portland, OR. Here it is in action: <a href="http://calagator.org/" rel="nofollow">http://calagator.org/</a><p>It's a straight-forward Rails app (2.3.5/1.8.7 last I checked)<p>I'm not on the team that created it, I'm just a fan. I customized and deployed it for a project last year and it was pretty easy.<p>I'm astounded more tech communities aren't using it or something similar.

They're probably Emacs users

There's a ripe market opportunity for a free or significantly cheaper alternative to Meetup, unless I'm unaware of a competitive one that already exists. $12/month is absurd for what amounts to a BB service with a handful of social networking features.

I hate it when companies make these decisions without warning the customers. Even if they are doing something against their terms.

Well, this is the first I've heard of the meetup and now I'm interested. The cancellation might be a blessing in disguise in that regard...

Looks like it's back up <a href="http://www.meetup.com/Vim-London" rel="nofollow">http://www.meetup.com/Vim-London</a>

&#62; In their generic message, they don’t indicate which product was apparently being promoted.<p>Yes, I too, was baffled as to which product they could possibly be referring to.

They got SWAT-ed by those evil emacs guys.

If meetup.com isn't willing to have at least a SINGLE exchange of emails prior to killing your group, they don't deserve your business, or anyone else's. That's just lazy, period. A "specialist" shouldn't be able to close a group without following a procedure. A single opinion is not a procedure.

It might be a long night, so bring your magic the gathering cards.