Meetup

I had the extreme misfortune of attending the Meetup "Bay Area New Beginnings" in Menlo Park, Ca. On Thanksgiving Day. I was commenting on how good the mash potatoes were when a woman, along with a male side kick, started imposing her Ku Klux Klan views on everyone there. I calmly countered some of her blatant lies which included a religious slur against Muslims. I commented after her criticism of the Clinton Foundation, that the Foundation had gotten an award for its work in reducing Aids in Africa. This woman then said "Well I work for the Center for Disease Control and I know Muslims can not be taught to control Aids." I pointed out to her that much of Africa is actually Christian. Her remarks violate Meetup guidelines about racism (her prejudice against Africans) and religious discrimination but the host did nothing to shut her up and my fellow attendees were harassing ME to shut up instead of this far right racist kook. I sent an email to the host about this bad behavior and she just has ignored my concerns, not even posting a response. IF YOUR ARE A MINORITY, A FEMINIST OR EVEN A MODERATE REPUBLICAN, DO NOT ATTEND THIS MEETUP! When I expressed concerns about the Republican party's plans to cut Social Security and Medicare and just let seniors starve, this woman started grinning like it was funny! I just told the people present I was not putting up with anymore crap and left. What a bunch of racist, sexist, ageist pricks in this Meetup. BOYCOTT THEM!

I am a leader of a mental health advocacy group, and wanted to use MU to gather people in our rural areas applying as a PAID member. Meet Up rejected my application, but continued to send spam wanting me to join their forum. NO THANKS, you just rejected me, but hey, us people who have a tendency to be more vocal than you "normal" people (ha ha lol sure if you believe it), we are vocal because we get pushed aside at every turn. We are lumped into one type of person and suddenly when you have this horrendous label called "mental illness" that society has hatefully tagged us with, it's scary when your rights quickly deminish and you find yourself pretty much alone. Don't anyone even dare say they MIGHT be depressed otherwise you may have people trying to get you to the hospital. Over two years ago I made the horrendous mistake of "confiding" in my neighbor that i was severely depressed. Prior to that dreadful conversation that I regret having, we shared a wonderful friendship as far as distant neighbors can go including Christmas gift exchange. Now she won't talk to me and peers out windows as if she should be afraid. Can anyone understand how horrible this is to endure when I have a Master's degree and helped many many people in my former career? I'm far more advanced than this neighbor, BUT for the label I have now, she believes she should fear me? I've had a rude awakening as now I know exactly how mentally ill people are treated, and Meet Up is just another business who would rather not have us less desirable types on their forum. I will never associate with Meet Up for any reason or any purpose or any group. Meet Up Discriminates! Does anyone know of a competitor that would allow a mental illness advocacy group on their forum? We really could use the help in getting the word out to folks who have nobody to talk to in rural areas so they are not feeling so alone. Thx

I was a member since 2005. I attended my first meetup in 2006, met my longterm bf of nearly 4 years that day which unfortunately ended badly with a horrible break. I then met a close friend not long after the break up at another meetup and met many nice people, none of whom became more than meet up friends but who were nice people to occasionally spend time with.

I had my frustrations with meetup: endless rsvps and warnings not to cancel at short notice or you will be deleted from a group- I find this ridiculous since life happens, we get sick suddenly, emergencies come up etc. Bad instructions to meet up locations, early morning only events and such, event organizers who don't show up, don't wait for the group, don't communicate via email, and one who refused to give more specific parking directions to an event because I hadn't signed up for the meetup yet. The worst was probably when I was on a hike, my blood sugar was dropping and I and another woman who had bad knee pain lagged behind and the leader never even noticed or asked if we needed help. Overall it was a good experience and the people organizing events were nice.

I hadn't logged in on my phone/laptop for 2 months maybe due to having too much going on and I tried to log in the other day to find Meetup has deleted my account, with no notification. I received a response that various email providers such as yahoo/aol etc. require that if an email isn't working and or someone hasn't used the account for 6 months their account should be deleted. I know I had logged in in a six month period so this is bogus. My email is still working, it's not a yahoo/aol etc. I'm very disappointed that all my groups and friends are gone now, I had some old comments from friends I wanted to keep and who knows I might have wanted to click on those friends and look them up at some point again. How does meetup justify deleting a member account in good standing without even notifying them? Very upset!

Avoid becoming an organizer for Meetup.org. It is difficult to resign as an organizer and stop payments. I smell a scam.

I sure hope another company steps in and starts offering what Meetup started with, but putting back features they took away that we all wanted, and fixing things they seem to keep breaking. It doesn't work from an organizer side, and doesn't work from a user side either. I'm baffled how you can ONLY leave a review of a group when you ARE a member, you leave a bad review, the organizer can just throw you off. I got removed from a group for nothing more than having a startle reaction to the organizer coming up and jabbing me with her hand, I explained my reaction was due to having fibromyalgia, didn't even raise my voice, and told her not to worry about it, next thing I know I'm banned from the group for "yelling" at her! Think Meetup cares? Or leaves me a way to warn other people that this organizer discriminates against people with disabilities? Nope. There is NO way to contact an organizer to even ask them to explain their decision or give an explanation, once they decide to throw you out for the most ridiculous of reasons. On the organizer side of things, we HATE that people can't decide whether to have a "maybe" option for RSVPing anymore, to better judge attendance, and notifications are spotty at best. Communication options with your groups are just terrible. Comments posted to the group are so limited in size as to be useless, but discussion group threads often missed by the majority of people. So little of the site is user-friendly, they badly need to listen to the people that use the site about what is wrong and fix it because right now they basically seem to just not care about how much everyone is struggling to keep groups running. We've had multiple groups this year shut down because people just are having so much trouble using the site and then not coming to events that organizers can't get dues to pay for their usage of it. Without a free plan to help get small groups going, I don't see many new ones starting after people have seen so many of them fail. People don't want to pay dues for a group they don't know is going to be around long-term, and the fact that Meetup bases it on the number of members in the group and not how many actually ATTEND events alone is a thing they should look at changing.