For use when choosing a meetup that has had events in your area, the system should display locations for all or all recent events on a map. This could be done in various ways...

1) It could display each actual address as a pushpin. This would not be ideal because repeat events would be on top of each other and not represented properly, and it would potentially expose exact addresses that should be kept confidential.

2) A "heat map" overlay like what padmapper.com does with walkscores and crimescores. Areas with more events would be red. Areas with fewer events would be blue and those in the middle would be a shade in between.

3) A circle plot. Areas with more past events would be represented with large circles. Those with fewer events would be smaller circles.

In options 2 and 3, the data points would represent event counts in a particular geographical square and would be centered on the center of the square.

The new "find" feature substitutes Meetup methodology for organizer judgement. As repeatedly noted on the forums, Meetup would not want to substitute their logo with a random, member generated photo - please don't force this onto organizers, either.

We don't want to have to make our groups private, but many of us have been forced to take this route. Your method allows inappropriate photos which do not represent our groups to be the main ad.

A high number of group joins isn't the focus of a responsible organizer. ACTIVE members is the focus. If a member can't be bothered to read about the group, but joins based solely on "recent, dynamic content" which may or may not be an accurate reflection of the group, that member is unlikely to be active.

Finally, as I've pointed out before, your method allows for creepy group representations - I had to point out to you that one group had a cemetery as its "logo," (thanks to you - the org designated photo was a beautiful garden), and another group had a nude infant. Not cool.

Organizers pay for their site. I do understand that we sometimes complain about things that we shouldn't. However, having control over our "brand" should be a no-brainer.

With all the meetup emails I get, I don't need to see announcements for female-only or gay-only groups (I'm a straight male), or for groups that are outside of my age range. I'm sure women feel the same about male-only meetup groups.

I still want to get announcements for meetups that might interest me, but these just clog by my in-box even more.

This can be solved by making optional fields for gender, age, and sexual orientation (these can be check boxes, so people can check more than one option if necessary). Then, meetup organizers can select which categories their group applies to, and announcements would only be sent to people that match.

It would be very very helpful if you can have it whereby from a member's meetup location you determine that the member attends meetup in different cities and or states, and therefore make it easier to search for meetups they might be interested in.

How might this happen you might ask?
Well in my case due to the nature of my job, I mostly work in different cities and or states from which I live in. Since many times I need to use my start phone to search for meetups, it makes it difficult trying to enter the criteria and I have to always wait till one gets to a PC. It would really be nice either when we enter a city to search for meetups you default the list of Zip codes in or around that city, or better yet ditch the criteria of needing a Zip Code and instead use mileage from that city. Since many times when in a new or different city we.might not know the Zip code and need to Google it anyway.
Then when you store one's meetups they are linked to the major city/metro-area, and so when going to search the first option you give is to choose which of the cities they want to search on, and then use mileage around or from the city instead of zip codes.

I am positive there are pple like me who work in other cities or states from where they live, or some who might be visiting an area for some days, weeks or months, and might want to do activities with meetup groups there, because you might or spend more time in the other location you work than the home location, though you still do events when you get back home every so often.
Otherwise right now the most convenient option is finding meetups according to one' current location.

When Meetup Members are surfing for a group to join, some of the pictures/photos that randomly turn up representing the group are either inappropriate or very private and meant for members eyes only and should not be used as a promotion for the group. This is a major privacy issue and I don't want to be forced to make my group private because of it. Some groups (and I would imagine most of them) would prefer only a logo or certain chosen pics to represent their group to the world. I therefore suggest this. Have only the logo pic as the default to be automatically used to represent the group and have tick boxes for all other images in the photo gallery which are all unticked and Organisers have the option to tick them to use any they want in a random option to represent the group. There should also be a simple "random" or "fixed" tick box. If fixed is ticked, only one pic can represemt the group and if random, then the system can choose any ticked photos/pics in the gallery. This way a funny undies down mooning shot doesn't end up being displayed for all the world to see as a representation for anyone's social group. No-one really wants to see that or my messy desk for example which occasionally turns up representing Melbourne Women's Personal Development Group.

We're a car club that holds our own events, but also list events in the area that are open to our club. Obviously, we'd like our events to be featured for our members, but many other events may be of interest. We have, on average, 2-3 meetups per month, and have some events scheduled six months in advance. That means that anything that's not featured is not just off the bottom of the page, but follows events six months from now. People don't scroll through six months of events to find what's happening next week. IMO, the Featured Flag is more than enough to point out the events our club deems important vs. mildly interesting. Any way to give us the option to list all the Meetups in chronological order?

For example, I help run an outdoors and adventure group. Our event types might be "Social", "Hiking", "Mountain Biking","Rock Climbing", "Sailing", etc.
Many members are only interested in Hiking, for example, and hate having to scroll down past numerous other events to find the few they are interested in.

These categories might be related to the keywords used to define a group but it shouldn't be assumed that all keywords correspond to a category.

e.g. for our group we use three keywords "rambling", "walking", "hiking", but the category would probably just be "hiking".

Allow users to select which events they want to see on the events list and allow event hosts/organisers etc to define which categories apply to their event when they are organising events.

You *could* limit each event to 1 category but this might be a limitation for some groups, plus it might be difficult to re-engineer once you limit events to 1 category only. We sometimes do events which offer say mountain biking and hiking, for example, which it would be handy to list under both, but I guess we could always have a "multidisciplinary" event type. We might also want to flag some events as "weekends away".

Allow users to select which event categories they want updates for in emails. Allow users to filter the list of events that appear on the group website when they view it. There should be some indication on the website of the filters in use, with have "edit filter" and "clear filters" buttons as a minimum. Alternatively, you could just have a drop down list which would allow members to select which category of events they wanted to see or leave blank if they want to see everything. E.g. if I selected "Hiking" from the drop down list, it would show only events involving hiking.

You could also add filters for the rsvp status of events i.e. to show events they have rsvped "yes"or "no" to or "haven't RSVPed yet".

The user should be able to filter upcoming and past events on the web site in this way as well as suggestions.

All groups should have a special, default event type of "universal" which allows some events appear on all e-mails etc, e.g. we'd want our members to see things such as club general meetings so would make these "universal" or default and they would appear whatever the user selected (if this annoys users then that's between us and them, not something meetup should dictate to us).