How to search for events in a city and exclude nearby events in other cities?

[Steevithak]

I've baffled by how I can get a list of events in a specific city ONLY. I've tried the /2/open_events and 2/cities APIs but both seem to return a lot unwanted results that are close to my target city but not actually in it. All I want is a list of meetups which are happening in a target city, not stuff happening in other nearby cities. Is there a way to do this? Is there an API that will do a string match of the city and state name in the meetup address with queries I provide, for example? Something where I could say return any meetup whose address contains exactly "city, state".

Maybe my trouble is because I'm in a dense metropolitan area (Dallas / Fort Worth) with around 50 smaller cities all up against each other, so any search that includes a "radius" can't possibly work. (I tried setting the radius to zero in hopes of excluding things outside the target city but that doesn't work either). Any ideas?

[Doug Tangren]

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Steevithak <steev...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've baffled by how I can get a list of events in a specific city ONLY. I've tried the /2/open_events and 2/cities APIs but both seem to return a lot unwanted results that are close to my target city but not actually in it. All I want is a list of meetups which are happening in a target city, not stuff happening in other nearby cities. Is there a way to do this? Is there an API that will do a string match of the city and state name in the meetup address with queries I provide, for example? Something where I could say return any meetup whose address contains exactly "city, state".

Maybe my trouble is because I'm in a dense metropolitan area (Dallas / Fort Worth) with around 50 smaller cities all up against each other, so any search that includes a "radius" can't possibly work. (I tried setting the radius to zero in hopes of excluding things outside the target city but that doesn't work either). Any ideas?

The short answer is that you can't currently, but this is something we can look into in the future. We also have a similar problem on the site. Our searches are based on radius from a given point. Selecting a city simply gives you a centroid to base that radius on. We have a similar problem in NYC which is also densely populated with Meetups close to one another. The best way to mitigate the problem for the time being is to use a small radius.

 

--
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Meetup API" group.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
meetup-api+...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/meetup-api?hl=en?hl=en
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Meetup API" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to meetup-api+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Steevithak]

On Monday, November 4, 2013 9:04:55 AM UTC-6, Doug Tangren wrote:

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Steevithak <steev...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've baffled by how I can get a list of events in a specific city ONLY. I've tried the /2/open_events and 2/cities APIs but both seem to return a lot unwanted results that are close to my target city but not actually in it. All I want is a list of meetups which are happening in a target city, not stuff happening in other nearby cities. Is there a way to do this? Is there an API that will do a string match of the city and state name in the meetup address with queries I provide, for example? Something where I could say return any meetup whose address contains exactly "city, state".

The short answer is that you can't currently, but this is something we can look into in the future. We also have a similar problem on the site. Our searches are based on radius from a given point. Selecting a city simply gives you a centroid to base that radius on. We have a similar problem in NYC which is also densely populated with Meetups close to one another. The best way to mitigate the problem for the time being is to use a small radius.

Thanks, good to know I'm not crazy. Searching for all the meetups in a given city seems like such an obvious use of the API, I'm surprised it's not possible. I guess what I'll do is make the request from Meetup, then filter out all the bogus results on my end until I get only the meetups in the target city.