This issue has been brought up many times, and I agree that it’s a major problem. The solution I suggested was to have all the meetup locations be brought together into a single weekly meetup thread, with all the city names in the title. This could be done either automatically with a little bit of coding, or by just having someone do the coordination. I even volunteered to be the one doing the coordinating. But no one seemed to be interested in actually agreeing to do it. I still stand by my suggestion, if it is adopted.
It seems to me that the forum format is ill suited for the subject matter in the first place. Unless the intent is to use the discussion forum raise awareness of the meetups, it seems to me that a website specifically designed for the meetups would make more sense. Especially since most people aren’t going to have much interest in a meetup more than, say, 100 miles away from where they live. If people really want to be notified about the meetups without having to go to a separate website, couldn’t that be accomplished through an RSS feed or some such solution? Granted, that would take more effort on individual LWers, but I have doubts about how much clutter should be accepted simply to make becoming aware of every meetup as effortless as possible.
Is there a way on my end to tell my computer to not include any post that includes “Meetup” in the title?
Frank Adamek has done what you suggest for years. That you don’t notice it being done is a pretty bad sign about the idea. If you want to contribute, you should be trying to get people to use his system, rather than trying to introduce a new system. Or maybe you should suggest modifications. But the first step is knowing the current system.
I’m aware of Frank’s posts to main. It came up during the last discussion about this idea. What I am suggesting is to remove the individual meetup threads from discussion, to clear up the clutter. In addition, the meetup cities would be right up there in the title (to respond to objections that having a single thread would result in reduced visibility). Instead of everyone submitting to discussion and then someone gathering up everything in main, everyone would simply submit to the person doing the coordinating. The reason I proposed myself as a volunteer was that I didn’t know if Frank would be willing to do this, given that it would require daily correspondence with the people organizing the meetups.
I’m not sure how much of the difference is more activity. It feels like a higher proportion of things I’m interested in, but that could just be more frequency of things I’m interested in.
This issue has been brought up many times, and I agree that it’s a major problem. The solution I suggested was to have all the meetup locations be brought together into a single weekly meetup thread, with all the city names in the title. This could be done either automatically with a little bit of coding, or by just having someone do the coordination. I even volunteered to be the one doing the coordinating. But no one seemed to be interested in actually agreeing to do it. I still stand by my suggestion, if it is adopted.
It seems to me that the forum format is ill suited for the subject matter in the first place. Unless the intent is to use the discussion forum raise awareness of the meetups, it seems to me that a website specifically designed for the meetups would make more sense. Especially since most people aren’t going to have much interest in a meetup more than, say, 100 miles away from where they live. If people really want to be notified about the meetups without having to go to a separate website, couldn’t that be accomplished through an RSS feed or some such solution? Granted, that would take more effort on individual LWers, but I have doubts about how much clutter should be accepted simply to make becoming aware of every meetup as effortless as possible.
Is there a way on my end to tell my computer to not include any post that includes “Meetup” in the title?
I think it works to have meet-ups on this site rather than in a separate blog, but they shouldn’t be separate posts in discussion.
Frank Adamek has done what you suggest for years. That you don’t notice it being done is a pretty bad sign about the idea. If you want to contribute, you should be trying to get people to use his system, rather than trying to introduce a new system. Or maybe you should suggest modifications. But the first step is knowing the current system.
I’m aware of Frank’s posts to main. It came up during the last discussion about this idea. What I am suggesting is to remove the individual meetup threads from discussion, to clear up the clutter. In addition, the meetup cities would be right up there in the title (to respond to objections that having a single thread would result in reduced visibility). Instead of everyone submitting to discussion and then someone gathering up everything in main, everyone would simply submit to the person doing the coordinating. The reason I proposed myself as a volunteer was that I didn’t know if Frank would be willing to do this, given that it would require daily correspondence with the people organizing the meetups.
I don’t know how typical I am, but I check Discussion at lot more often than Main.
That’s because Discussion has a lot more activity, right?
I’m not sure how much of the difference is more activity. It feels like a higher proportion of things I’m interested in, but that could just be more frequency of things I’m interested in.
Yes I think the proposed aggregated meetup threads should be in discussion.