Starting January 15, 2026, we’ll be deactivating Meetup accounts that have been inactive for 3 years or more. This change is part of our ongoing commitment to data protection, platform health, and regulatory compliance.

Below, we explain what’s changing, why it’s happening, and what it means for your group.

Why we’re making this change

In line with the GDPR’s data protection principles, we will deactivate accounts belonging to users who have been inactive on Meetup for 3 years or longer.

In this context, “inactive” means that a user has not interacted with Meetup at all — including:

• opening or engaging with Meetup emails,
• using the Meetup mobile apps,
• or visiting the Meetup website.

What we’ve already done

Before proceeding with account removals, we reached out directly to all affected users to give them an opportunity to re-engage.

Any user who interacted with that email will not have their account deleted.

What organizers may notice

As a result of this operation, some organizers may see a one-off decrease in their group’s member count shortly after January 15, 2026.

While this change may appear sudden, it reflects the removal of long-inactive accounts rather than a loss of active or engaged members.

How this affects group visibility and ranking

We want to be clear: total historical member count is not used as a metric to rank or surface groups on Meetup.

Group visibility is based on a combination of factors such as:

• activity,
• engagement,

• and overall group quality,

  among others.

This means that active, well-run groups will continue to be discovered and recommended as before.

What happens going forward

The same inactivity rules will continue to apply in the future. However, after this initial cleanup, account removals will happen much more gradually over time, avoiding large, sudden changes.

Questions or concerns?

If you have questions or concerns about this change, our Customer Support team is available and happy to help.

We appreciate your understanding and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you for helping us keep Meetup a safe, healthy, and engaged community.

Group ratings, which were previously only visible to organizers and leadership team members, are now be publicly visible!

Here’s what’s new:

⭐ Average group rating
Your group’s average rating (out of 5 stars) will now be visible across Meetup. This rating reflects how members have rated your past events, giving prospective members a helpful snapshot of your group experience.

💬 Member reviews
Moving forward, written event reviews submitted by members will also be visible to the public. Only new reviews will be shared, meaning all feedback submitted prior to March 27th will remain visible only to organizers and leadership team members.

Members are clearly notified that their reviews will be public before submitting.

🛡️ Safety first
If a review seems abusive or inappropriate, it can be reported by anyone. Our Trust & Safety team will review and take action as needed to keep things respectful and constructive.

Why this matters
This change isn’t just about transparency—it’s about helping your group thrive! We hope this change will help you:

✅ Show off your group’s awesome community
✅ Build trust with new and existing members
✅ Increase event attendance by giving members a chance to review real feedback

In fact, our tests show that members are significantly more likely to RSVP when they can see ratings and reviews. That’s a win-win for everyone. 😍

For more information about how group ratings and feedback works, take a look at our Help Center articles:

• Reviewing my group's event ratings
• Viewing event feedback from members
• Sharing feedback about an event

We're happy to share that we’ve recently fixed a bug where the automatic welcome email was not automatically sending to new members. From now on, the email should be sending as expected!

Before, all members received an .ics invitation for their events, from which they could manually add an event to their personal calendar. This process isn’t ideal: on top of being manual to set up, it also means that events aren’t automatically updated on personal calendars if the details of the event changed. With the majority of Meetup members using a Gmail account, we saw the opportunity to leverage the email provider’s automatic event creation feature in Google Calendar. 

Now, the email Meetup sends after a member RSVPs automatically creates an event in the attendee’s Google calendar. If the member doesn’t use Google, no problem—the same email still contains the original .ics invitation. 

Please note that for automatic event creation to work correctly in Google, a member must first have some personal settings enabled in their Gmail account. We recommend you share this help article with any members who are having trouble seeing their Meetup events displayed in their calendar.

We recently doubled-down on improving the process for adding venues to your events.  

Previously, you couldn’t search for and add a previously created private venues, and neither public nor private locations were not searchable by address. Now, you can do all this easily when creating a new event. Check out the 30s video below to see how it works!

Previously, the ability to click a link wasn’t consistent across platforms. However, we saw that having clickable links available was very important, since the majority of links being shared in DMs and Discussions were map links to help members find the right event or meeting location. Now, links in DMs and Discussions are clickable on Web, iOS, and Android!

We’ve simplified the process of exporting your attendee/member details by making everything available from one place in your organizer tools! 

Now, you can get information formally found in the Attendee details (all organizers), Members list (all organizers), and Registration responses (Pro only) in one consolidated document. Check out this quick video for more information on how to access your attendee details and the new CSV file format.

We've released a small improvement to help organizers better navigate the various dues states of their members. 

In the "All members" list, members whose payments have failed (but Stripe is still retrying the charge) will be marked with the "Grace" status. A helpful tooltip will explain this status so you can easily identify and manage these cases. This should make it easier to stay on top of your group's member dues.