I was poking around the Meetup organizer documentation and came across an article about merging a group with a domain name. I thought doing this would be pretty neat. So I spoke with Kevin about it and he agreed to it. I registered cleveland20s30s.org and cleveland20s30s.com for the group. I have a hosting package and registering domains only costs me $10/year and this is my gift to the group.

In the near future, all you will need to do to go to the Cleveland 20s & 30s Meetup group is to go to cleveland20s30s.org. (cleveland20s30s.com will redirect to cleveland20s30s.org, hence that will also work) When you are browsing the group's pages, whether you entered via cleveland20s30s.org or Meetup, it will appear that you are browsing cleveland20s30s.org. This is an illusion. All group content will still be delivered by and to meetup.com. In layman's terms, all cleveland20s30s.org traffic will redirect to meetup.com and meetup.com will sense when a user is being redirected to its site from cleveland20s30s.org and will forward all activity to our group page appropriately. The technical aspect is cleveland20s30s.org is redirected to www.cleveland20s30s.org which is "CNAMEed" to www.meetup.com.

cleveland20s30s.org: SPREAD THE WORD!

Thanks for doing this for the group Tootie. What do you feel the long term benefits of our own domain name/web site will be? Do you feel we'll be able to leave out meetup all together and save Kevin money? What about planning meetups? Any new cool designs of our own for the page? What are your suggestions on ways to "spread the word"? Thanks again.... : )

Is it possible to go with something like cleveland2030s.org or cleveland2030.org?

Hey Tootie, I tried the link and it sent me to meetup but to a page that said "The meetup your trying to connect to doesn't exist." Hope you can fix it cause I think it's a good idea.

Corrie,
Currently when people look for the group they have to go to Meetup then find the group inside the site. A domain redirect is will take you directly to the site and in the long run will be easier for people to find in websearches. It's basically a shortcut. This is not meant to replace the meetup group site just make it easier to find.

Well, it will be easier to promote the group. Whereas in the past we'd have to tell people to go to meetup.com, put in their zip code and look for the Cleveland 20s & 30s, now we can simply tell them to check out cleveland20s30s.org.

The move to a domain will ease a transition off of Meetup if we so choose to go that route at some point in time. However, doing so would require a decent amount of work and then we wouldn't have the steady stream of new members that Meetup would be able to provide. I do have the tools needed for such a move, and I think there are decent PHP/database solutions that operate similar to meetup that are out there. I am not a graphical designer; any kind of design I would come up for something like that with would be too simple.

"Spread the word" was just something I threw out there. I really didn't mean much by it other than when you promote the group, tell 'em to check out cleveland20s30s.org.

Alex, we could register other domains. I went with "cleveland20s30s" because it looked the best to me. I can register more domains, but each is $10 per year. I'm happy with the two I already registered, but if you'd like me to register one for you, I can. I can also set up e-mail accounts on these domains if desired.

Yeah, Dave, it's not working right now because Meetup has to ensure everything is set up properly with the domain (it is) and then once they do that they notify the organizer that the switch can then be made which he/she has to initiate. I alluded to this by starting out with "In the near future...".

And this is a step up from a simple redirect. Like I described earlier, it will appear to a user that they are browsing cleveland20s30s.org when looking at the group when in reality they are still on meetup.com.

There is a problem right now with this, and it seems to be an issue with my domain registrar. I just had a conversation with their technical support, and they brushed it off as a non-issue, but said they corrected it anyways. The problem is is that it appears their system is appending periods to inputted URLs for CNAMEs. So "www.meetup.com" becomes www.meetup.com." And what do you get when you put in "www.meetup.com."? What you currently see when you put in "cleveland20s30s.org". Updates to these kinds of things take some time to take effect, so we'll see if they really did fix the problem. I also have an e-mail in to Meetup support, but I don't think they'll tell me anything that I don't already know.

I'm pretty sure we're close to resolving the issues with this. My initial diagnosis of the problem seems to be incorrect, and the problem now appears to be a discrepancy with the data I instructed Kevin to forward to Meetup to initiate the change. In short, "Tootie fucked up". But I refuse to accept all of the blame. Meetup's instruction set and help file on the subject is quite misleading, which ultimately caused me to give the incorrect data to be inputted to Kevin. So I've given Kevin the correct data to input, and so it would seem we're back to square one where this change will be occurring "in the near future".

is working!

Very nice. All seems to be working as intended.