Give Organizers the Ability to Automatically Kick-Out Members who don't Attend an Event within a Defined Period of Time like 6 months
I only want Active members to remain members. Most MeetUp groups have what I call shadow members or Lurkers. Every 3 to 6 months, I have to manually pull up who attended what event to see that a member has indeed attended an event within 3 to 6 months. If not, I kick them out. I want a tool that would autoatically set it up that a member will be removed from a group if they don't attend an event within a determined time period. This would get rid off all those Lurkers.
Robert
shared this idea
19 comments
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Dave
commented
Kicking inactive members out or at least changing their membership to an inactive status helps responsible members in deciding whether to attend. I disagree with anyone who think that lurkers do no harm. They actually provide a false indication of the popularity of the group, which often leads to disappointment.
The criteria by which inactivity is positively determined should be, among other possibilities, a time limit and/or number of broken RSVPs. This should be a pre-determined set of options defined by meetup and placed on member IDs system-wide by the organizers of the groups in which a member belongs or had previously belonged.
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Romie Littrell
commented
I don't really get this one. Are lurkers hurting anything? The only issues I'm reading below are for abusive members, which is a different problem. Not everyone is as interested in our group as we are as organizers, give people who are trying to manage their time a break. If they're not very active they are at least our audience, which can be valuable too.
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Ivan Pellegrin
commented
I would like for the limit to be expressed as number of meetups. For instance, if a member has not attended any of the last 10 meetups, his/her membership is automatically revoked. They would receive an email explaining that and they will have the possibility to rejoin the group when they have more time.
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Mark Gronwald commented
I want the ability to have meetup automatically remove people from the group for no sign-in activity for 6 months. They might RSVP "no" to every meeting and I'd still consider them "active", just not interested in the content. But people who are not logging in at all are definitely not active.
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Anonymous
commented
This would be a great feature for me. As it is, I've got an eight percent active-member rate - six .months since ending a meeting or 12 months since visiting the site. Every year, I go through and contact non-participating members to encourage them to become more active. I don't get a response from most of them. They get deleted after another month. Then there are some who have genuine time-constraint issues, I work with them to get them involved. As it is now, new members don't become actual members until they show up to their first meeting, or they get dropped after a month. We meet every week, and are about to start meeting twice a week, so there's plenty of opportunity. If this gets implemented, I'd like to see the time limit be a parameter that can be modified by the Organizer; also, since there are sometimes mitigating circumstances, have the option prevent the deletion of members who otherwise meet the deletion criteria. Handle it the same way as pending memberships are done now.
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Cynthia
commented
I'd like to see members who don't attend for a set period of time booted to an inactive state - or maybe back to pending? My group has grads, so it would be great to have a seperate list of Alumni they could be added to, which woud still show them as members, but wouldn't allow them access to group emails, or submissions each month.
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Toni
commented
I agree with pip1. I very often cannot attend events and am temporarily inactive with meetup. As soon as I can I attend again. Why should members be pressured to "have" to go to events? This is supposed to be fun, not something we have to do or be kicked out, right?
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IDSocialConnect
commented
I agree that it would be helpful to have an easier way to remove members en masse, but before any member is removed I've sent a "We Miss You on Meetup" e-mail to those inactive for three or more months in the hopes of reengaging them. IDSocialConnect is a singles group so I'd congratulate them if they were inactive because they were in a relationship, but "If not, we're hoping you'll hang out with us soon." I'd give them stats on the number of members joining daily and the number of upcoming Meetups so they can see what they are missing. Oftentimes we'll see activity as a result of the e-mail (i.e., the number of members drop, Rsvps increase) or we receive e-mails from members apologizing for their inactivity (one member explained that he was deployed to Afghanistan).
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Claire
commented
1. A notification, "You have been inactive for 5 months and will be removed within 7 days unless you contact the organizer."
2. An automatic removal with a default or custom message.
Not all lurkers are harmless. Some are organizers and copy events from my calendar. I usually have to do detective work to find out. Since people hide the groups they are in, you don't know they are an organizer. The beauty of Meetup is the variety, if we all had the same calendar there wouldn't be a point of more than one group. -
Steven C
commented
I suspect this may backfire for the reasons given by others. One of my groups, for example, is so large that it is difficult for people to attend. Kicking them out because we are successful seems wrong.
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Anonymous
commented
I agree. And I like George's suggestion about auto-notification prior to removal. That way, if someone has been watching, but just hasn't found the right opportunity, we could let them stay in the group. But I am tired of 50% of the people who RSVP's not showing up. We always wait about 10 mins from the start time before we begin, because people tend to be late (that's another problem). I'm always afraid that we're going to leave someone behind ... but I guess if we did, they might learn a lesson . . .
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Bruce R.
commented
I used to purge what I thought were inactive members (people who did not visit the site for 6 months). However, we had people who simply relied on emails telling them what was happening, and they NEVER went to our Meetup site.
Most of our events do not require that people RSVP.
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Béatrice
commented
People are membres of so many groups that they don't even read the invitations! I used to send nice email to ask some of the people who hadn't been on the website for many months if they still wanted to be a membre and most of the time, they didn't even reply! I've got a small group so it is not a problem for me but I can understand it is more difficult when you have a very big group. I agree with you if it can help :-)
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Anonymous
commented
I agree. This feature would be beneficial. Allow us to remove a user after a pre-determined period of time we set.
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Pip1
commented
Is this still a free country or what? If someone replies yes & repeatedly no-shows that's one thing. But inactive membership is different. "Lurkers" aren't actually doing any harm. I have memberships of things I really really want to go to but due to circumstances beyond my control I haven't been able to get there yet. But I want to be in the loop so that when I have the chance I can jump in.
ALSO see my suggestion further down. After joining I sometimes find that the meetings are too far away. If locations were shown FIRST we could be more selective about what to join up to. -
Linda
commented
I belong to a group where the organizer now says there are 343 members in the group - NOT SO !!! I belonged for almost 2 years and the most that ever showed up was 20. When meetup location was moved, we lost members. There's a lot of people listed that don't even live near our meetup, in our state, who came once and never came back or who never attended at all. I think MeetUp should post the truth of who belongs in the group and the organizers should be held accountable. I stepped out of the group for a while to see if it was going to change for the better or not. I have not quit the group as yet.
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Anonymous
commented
I totally agree with this. I just deleted a member who RSVPs for 25 events, had 2 no shows and just signed up again to my new events.
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Tiffany
commented
I totally support this idea, although I have other issues that I'm using my votes for. I have a group of 500, and growing, members. It's rather tedious to have to go through the list and delete inactive members one by one. Honestly, considering how time consuming it is to remove myself from groups I'm no longer interested in, I would be relieved to find myself automatically deleted! Then I would stop getting so much junk mail!
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Gerald
commented
This is a good idea. I would only add that it would need to have the function of telling them they are being considered as a dormant account and would be archived (deleted) if no activity is present on their account within the next "X-Days. After that, the system does its thing.
