Yeah the London ones were enormous back in the day. I seem to remember 100+ attendees. We only have a tenth of the population - so my expectations are appropriately "managed" :)
I liked the submission flow, it was nice and simple. The only issue is that at the end of the process I got a page that looked like it was broken, so had to manually navigate to the main page.
We at Toughbyte (toughbyte.com) are working on an open source applicant tracking system (ATS), which we'll release within a week.
We've been doing tech recruitment for a while and discovered that few companies are satisfied with their current ATS. Changing systems every year is common despite being costly. The reason for this is that the needs of a company change as it grows and there are no systems that cater well to companies of different sizes.
We're aiming to build an ATS that can grow with your company through the use of a plugin architecture. We plan to charge for hosting as well as custom development.
Any feedback would be really appreciated! You can also email me at oleg@toughbyte.com
I run the Helsinki JavaScript meetup (https://meetabit.com/communities/helsinkijs) and we also built our own Rails based Meetup.com alternative called Meetabit, so let me comment on your points. I hope this is useful to the original poster as well.
1. Agreed, this has been a huge problem. We partially solved it by adding a captcha, forcing email address verification and adding nofollow to outbound links. Even so we get some spam communities created on occasion which we clean up semi-automatically.
2. Not been a problem for us, but we don't have any social networking features.
3. Has not been a problem for the site for the reason above. However, this has been a bit of an issue at the actual meetups. We've recently introduced an anti-harassment policy to address this problem and I'm thinking of adding functionality related to that to Meetabit.
4. We have a Facebook group as well which was quite active before the pandemic. Now it is completely dead. Whenever I promote events I get the most engagement on LinkedIn of all places. Email is still the best way to get the word out though.
5. Agree about not trying to be everything to everyone. I also think there's a big difference between professional and non-professional meetups, so we've focused on the former with an additional focus on tech. This has allowed us to grow to about 8K users so far with no marketing spend. The features that we have that Meetup.com does not are: talk proposals and archive as well as sponsorship profiles and offers.
> Wow, just wow. Am i alone in thinking this is not going to fly if all he did was write some software that helps with your financial anonymity? There must be more. Perhaps he also deployed it? That would be a different story. The article is quite murky in that regard. Perhaps they don't know yet
Code isn’t law. The law is the law. If you enable the crime willfully, you are a party to it.
The state of that comment has nothing to do with age. The first reply, specifically to the "Am i alone..." validation-seeking performative question, is "Probably."
I think you would find a significant population on HN that would agree with the comment I quoted. I don't fault them, that's just how some brains are built and operate (we are all wired differently), either due to a libertarian model or autism/neurodiversity (which also inherently optimizes for software dev and engineering aptitude). I just wish these folks, before doing something like this, would ask someone: "Hey! I have this belief, and I want to work on this. Is there any potential harm by doing so? What does the risk calculation look like?" instead of "Imma throw this out into the world and Imma be fine." You might not be fine! And imho, we'd all be better off if you were fine vs going to prison, at least in this context.
Just to provide another data point, I've been running the HelsinkiJS meetup (https://helsinkijs.org/) for 12 years and our upcoming event has had 230+ people register within a day, which is a record. We've also got sponsors lined up for the next 6+ months.
I should add that we ended up building https://meetabit.com/ to make it easier to run the events and it's now being used by around 10 tech meetups in Finland. So, if you're looking for a free Meetup.com alternative, you should check it out. If you have some questions, drop me a line at doreply@meetabit.com.
