Possible meet-p forum

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I've noticed that the meet-up sticky in the "Social Skills and Making Friends" forum is close to thirty pages and that "Getting to Know Each Other" also has a meet up sticky for members from Australia. I think that a forum would be nice for people to organize meet-ups by area.

I don't want to "rain on your parade", but the structure of a forum doesn't work terrifically well as a "meet up" system.

I believe there are a few more effective sites, for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, off-hand, I can't recall where... is it Google that run such a thing?

The problem is that you really need some element of locality to be handled by the site, automatically. Having a thousand threads to choose from, each with one person saying "Hello, I'm in <wherever>. Let's meet up." just doesn't work.

And... there is a fairly daunting security problem to get around.

For anyone in the UK, the NAS (http://www.nas.org.uk) do organise area meetings. They make a reasonable attempt at vetting people before they come along to the groups.

Lau, out of curiosity why are people vetted? Maybe I'm naive but I can't see why people would want to go to meetings that were not relevant to them? I can understand vetting for one on one meetings to filter out predators, but not to groups?

Maybe "vetting" is too strong a word.

As the NAS organise the meetings, it is their responsibility to ensure that it all works smoothly. Not only do they organise the meeting, but they also come along themselves, and directly delegate/recruit additional facilitators, who are most definitely vetted - and carry identity cards to prove it.

The logic behind checking out those who wish to join the group works both ways. They could, conceivably, tell someone that they felt the group might not be suitable for them, although I don't know of that ever happening.

The other side of the coin is that it gives them a chance to explain to the prospective attendee what the group does. It might be that some then decide they don't feel they would benefit from it.

I speak from the perspective of having been a member of my local group since shortly after I found out about Asperger's, which is roughly when I joined WP. I.e. about two and a half years. In that time, I know of no one who has been turned away. Some attend a few times then drift away. It varies. There are a core few who have remained for the whole period.

I've also started attending meetings at the NAS headquarters in Bristol, as a (the) representative of my particular group (Yeovil) amongst the several groups across the area. It has been... interesting.

I am not a member of the NAS.

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By way of an anecdote, w.r.t. the "vetting". When I first found out that the NAS organised such groups, I contacted them, via email. They sent me a pretty straightforward form to fill in, which I duly returned.

In the event, the person who was supposed to have checked me out, didn't get around to it, until too late, so I went along to my first meeting without actually being "invited".

No big deal, as it happened. It transpired that I wasn't a rabid gorilla and no one objected to my presence, plus it turned out I knew one of the facilitators, for a completely unrelated reason, from a couple of years before.

Thank you Lau, it makes sense now.

I don't think this is about a whole new forum but a section on WP instead of just one thread.

Terminology?

Here on WP we have the overall site, which has, amongst other things such as the articles and blogs, a set of forums (reached via "Discussion" at the top, though that link actually accesses "forums.html"). That hierarchy then goes:

Site
Discussion (Forums)
Forum
Thread
Post

There really isn't any current good way, to my mind, to fit a particularly useful meet-up system into that set up - unless it was by adding a whole new facility to the top of the site.

Anyone trying to set up a meet in Iceland is hardly likely to be interested in someone who wants to come to one in Denver.

On top of that, a good system would allow you to schedule regular meetings, visibly, and show who might be turning up, and so on.

Trying to do the above in an "ad hoc" way, using the fifty threads on the first page of a forum, sounds like a mess, to me.

I use meetup.com its how I found an aspergers group in my area

http://meetup.com/

I just a meetup did that way last Sunday SilentBob.

You can also subsitute Section for Forum

Not on WP.

I was trying to clarify what Greyhound was suggesting - she said:

We have threads and forums, but WP has nothing called a "section" (unless you might use that term loosely, at the forum index, to refer to the groupings of forums. I.e. saying that the "Adolescent Autism Forum" (curiously, that forum, forum22.html, is the only one to use the word "Forum" in its name) is part of the "Age/Gender related discussions" section.

The phpBB documentation (phpBB2 lurks at the roots of WP) doesn't seem to like the word "section" much, although it does wade in, at the start of "1.4. Creating forums" with:

In phpBB3, there's a tendency toward "forums" and "sub-forums".

I'd suggest that "section" was too vague a term to be useful... and I still don't quite know what Greyhound meant, when contrasting "forum" with "section".

I meant the equivalent of General Autism Discussion, Getting to know each other etc. So, using your example - the equivalent of the 'Adolescent Autism Forum', NOT a whole section as in 'Age/Gender related discussions'.

Sorry if my post was confusing

sorry ignore me wasn't paying attention

My main reason for proposing a meet-up forum is that as meet-ups in one area are organised people from other areas might feel too intimidated to propose one in their area. One forum (as opposed to a block of forums) would circumvent this.

If you want to have a meet up, just make a thread about it. I don't think there are enough groups or what have you, to make up a meetup section.