It's not particularly bad that they are charging for their service, but 
the problem is that they set their price too high -- $19/month. I think 
that $3 to $5 a month wold be a price range that would keep most members 
(especially if they offered the first 6 months free while the group gets 
established). At $19 they are going to lose a lot of groups.

Robby, if you and some group wrote an open source Rails app to do the 
same thing, I'll bet you could host it on your Planet Argon service at a 
low enough price to be worth it, while still paying its way.

Curt

Francis Hwang wrote:
> Interesting of them to make those changes. It'll be interesting to see 
> how it works, though I'm sure with a monthly fee they know they'll be 
> losing a lot of users ...
> 
> Anyway, we use Yahoo! Groups, and I like it just fine.
> 
> http://groups.yahoo.com/
> 
> On Apr 13, 2005, at 2:39 AM, Robby Russell wrote:
> 
>> Just a FYI to all you meetup.com .rb people:
>>
>> http://www.meetup.com/changes/
>>
>> Perhaps this would be a good time for the community to build something
>> (in Rails of course) for all the .rb groups that are popping up around
>> the world.
>>
>> Infact, I'd be interested in helping/leading such a project.. if anyone
>> is interested in discussing it more.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> -Robby