Managing your Meetup Group message boards

A thriving message board unites the group, and encourages new members to join. Your care and feeding of the group message board can keep the conversation going. Use it to follow up on chats that started at your Meetup, and to spark discussions on the direction of your group, on the best times and places to meet--and anything else you like.

As Organizer, you have some superpowers that regular members don't have. For example, you can edit, close, pin or delete any post on your group message board.

Some guidelines:

• Editing messages: Members can edit their own messages. You can edit any message. If you want to clarify a point in a member's post, in most cases it's better to do that in a reply rather than editing their message directly. However, sometimes you may want to make a change directly to the message. In that case, you should leave a note on the message saying what you edited and why. For example: "Changed the title of this discussion to reflect the content of the messages better."
• Closing messages: This allows you to keep info posted for members to read but not comment like an event announcement. Sometime you might find conversation has become a little heated (or continued for too long)and being able to close the conversation can give everyone a little time to cool off.
• Pinning a message: This is great for welcome message, group FAQs, Group Accounting, polls etc. by pinning the message all members will see that one first

• Deleting messages This feature lets you remove messages that are irrelevant to the group, spam, or abusive in some way. If the abuse is severe enough that you are considering getting the member removed from your group, and you haven't been able to resolve the problem after a direct contact, you may want to forward a link to the message to Meetup's support team for investigation instead of removing it. (Write to organizer [at] meetup.com.)

  Don't remove a message that's relevant to the topic and not abusive just because you disagree with the content. Try to respond to it directly and constructively. If you think that members need to tone down their posts, you'll often get a better response by reminding them to play nice rather than removing their material without an explanation. If members feel you're heavy-handed, it shuts the conversation down. Watch how our Meetup Moderators do it on the main message boards.