The backstory is that I, Vidar Andersen, the original initiator of the Cologne meetup - initially make a mistake.

I made a mistake in not updating my payment details before my credit card expired earlier this year. Meetup.com then automatically stepped me down as an organizer and mailed the group that I had stepped down as an organizer. IMO that's a pretty lame way of doing business, but hey, it's their business and not mine. Apparently it works for them.

Then I tried to update my payment details with new credit card details to no avail. It just wasn't possible to make meetup.com accept any new credit card for me anymore. I was only getting error messages. I then contacted Meetup.com and notified them about the situation.

At that same time, I asked co-organizer Francis to and add a credit card to automatically take over as organizer for me and reinstate my organizer status. Said. Done. Problem solved, right? Not so fast.

In the meantime, meetup.com got back to me and revoked Francis' status and gave the organizer status back to me with a kind offer of an extended new grace period as organizer to sort the payment issue out. Meanwhile, I was still unable to update my payment details and add any new credit card credentials without getting error messages and I notified Meetup.com of this. I have still yet to hear back from them on that.

It's worth noting that had meetup.com just left it as it were with Francis' payment details as the organizer, we wouldn't have been in this predicament in the first place.

Yesterday when the group had yet to expire and I had yet to hear back from meetup.com on my latest issue report, the Hacker News Cologne Meetup group was taken over by an unknown individual. Or in meetup.com's parlance, someone "stepped up to be the organizer" of the group.

I immediately reached out to this person informing them of the payment issue situation, thanking them for stepping up but informing them that it was neither needed or wanted, offering to resolve the ownership issue amicably and in private as soon as possible. I never heard back.

In stead I woke up to what now seems to be a blatant attempt to aggressively acquire customers for their event(s). The name, logo and purpose of the group had been changed to something completely different.

Then mass mailings started to arrive from the person who had taken over our group accusing, us the real organizers, of lying and trying to change the group [back to the original state]. Needless to say, we do not agree.

As I scrambled to counter the accusations and inform the group's members, we the original organizers were getting our organizer status removed from this individual. We were also barred from mailing to the group without censorship and approval by the same individual. Needless to say, those messages did not come through to the group. Then I posted the same messages to the group's message boards, just to find the hijacker removing the boards altogether. In a matter of minutes we were effectively shut out, unable to communicate with the community over meetup.com.

So that's where we're at right now. We the original Hacker News Cologne Meetup organizers are completely out of control of our own community platform on meetup.com. We've filed a complaint with meetup.com to resolve the situation and it is still pending a reply. And yes, we do appreciate the sweet irony of a hacker group hacked as we move on.

We apologize for the intermission and it's now back to business as usual: We'll meet up again on schedule with two awesome new speakers lined up for you at SolutionSpace, November 28th 1900 CET.

This time we are relying on you instead of meetup.com to get the word out. You know what to do.