Meetup Group & Event Monitor - Schedules and Changes

Meetup Group & Event Monitor

Follow public community events without repeatedly opening group pages. Turn Meetup group or event URLs into structured schedules, venues, public group size and aggregate going counts, then compare saved observations to see what changed.

Useful for community teams, event researchers and agencies maintaining a focused local or industry watchlist. Each event has a stable source identity, its original time offset, a source link and an observation timestamp. No attendee identities or member lists are collected.

Start with a public group

{
  "groupUrls": ["https://www.meetup.com/orlandopython/"],
  "maxResults": 5
}

Click Start, then open the Dataset for event records. Use Coverage and diagnostics to see how many events the public page exposed, and Readable run report for a concise run summary.

No Meetup login, API key or proxy setup is required. Empty input uses this public sample. Upcoming events naturally change; a group with no active events can correctly return zero rows with successful, empty coverage.

A practical event change feed

Question	Fields to use
Did the schedule move?	startDate, endDate, timeZone, scheduleChanged and previous values
Is the event in person or online?	Source eventType and public venue fields
Did interest change?	Aggregate goingCount, goingCountDelta and observation time
Is the community growing?	Public groupMemberCount and its delta on each event observation
Did the source report cancellation?	Source eventStatus; no cancellation inferred from a missing listing
Was the check complete?	SUMMARY.outputComplete, selectionTruncated and unreached sources

Each saved event is one result. Its group metadata and venue are included in the row. Going counts represent public RSVPs, not verified physical attendance.

Three ready-to-run recipes

1. Orlando Python events

{"groupUrls":["https://www.meetup.com/orlandopython/"],"maxResults":5}

2. Chennai Python events

{"groupUrls":["https://www.meetup.com/chennaipy/"],"maxResults":5}

3. A two-community watchlist

{
  "groupUrls": [
    "https://www.meetup.com/orlandopython/",
    "https://www.meetup.com/chennaipy/"
  ],
  "maxResults": 10
}

For an event already known to your workflow, place its exact https://www.meetup.com/group/events/id/ URL in eventUrls. If the same event is also discovered from a group, it is deduplicated before output.

Monitor changes over time

{
  "groupUrls": [
    "https://www.meetup.com/orlandopython/",
    "https://www.meetup.com/chennaipy/"
  ],
  "maxEvents": 10,
  "maxResults": 10,
  "comparePrevious": true,
  "onlyChanges": true,
  "snapshotName": "python-community-watch"
}

The first complete run saves a baseline and emits new events. Later runs compare stable event fields and include changedFields and previous. Unchanged events are skipped when onlyChanges is true. Use one writer at a time for the same scope and snapshot name.

History is scoped to the normalized group/event selection, maxEvents and snapshot name. Failed reads, unvisited details, incomplete group windows, time limits and spending limits preserve the prior baseline. Saved rows from a partial run remain useful observations, but they are not a complete watchlist check.

Important group-window limit

The Actor reads the active-event connection embedded in a public group page, commonly the first four events. It does not paginate, call private APIs or scan every event object in the page cache. Past events and unrelated cached records are not treated as upcoming events.

totalActiveEvents and embeddedEvents in source coverage make the difference visible. If the group reports more active events than are embedded, selectionTruncated is true, the run is partial, and comparison history does not advance. Use explicit event URLs for a known-event watchlist when you need complete comparison coverage for a larger group. Raising maxEvents cannot expand the source's embedded window.

Input reference

Field	Default	Purpose
groupUrls	Sample group	Up to 5 exact public group URLs
eventUrls	Empty	Up to 20 exact public event URLs; direct details take priority
maxEvents	10	Maximum selected event detail pages, 1–20
maxResults	10	Maximum confirmed event rows saved, 1–20
comparePrevious	false	Compare with the last complete saved baseline
onlyChanges	false	Enable comparison and skip unchanged observations
snapshotName	default	Independent history label; letters, numbers, underscores or hyphens
maxRunSeconds	120	Shared 30–120 second collection budget

Source campaign parameters are removed; authentication and unsupported query parameters are rejected. Only www.meetup.com group and event paths are supported. City-wide search, keyword discovery and attendee scraping are outside scope.

Understand the records

Dates retain the source's explicit UTC offset; the group timezone is recorded separately. A venue may be missing for online events or withheld until registration. Missing venue, fee or going count remains null; a missing fee never means that an event is free. Source fees, if supplied in the supported public structure, retain amount and currency and are not a checkout quote.

Member totals are public group aggregates. An event row may show the same group total as another event in that group; do not sum those totals as unique people. A disappearing event or an empty group list never triggers an invented cancellation or deletion row. Explicit event details can still represent a past event.

Output, API and integrations

Export Dataset rows as JSON or CSV. JSON preserves the nested venue and previous observation. The SUMMARY record reports discovery and detail reads separately as groupPagesSucceeded and eventPagesSucceeded; sourcesSucceeded counts both kinds of successful page reads. requestedSources counts user-supplied URLs. The RUN_REPORT HTML output presents this coverage without adding billed event rows.

Save a task for your watchlist and connect a schedule or integration to a spreadsheet, community dashboard or internal notification workflow. The same JSON input works through the Apify API or Apify MCP server. Include the source URL and observation time when an AI agent summarizes a changed event.

Pricing is $0.00005 per Actor start plus $0.003 per saved event observation ($3 per 1,000). Check the Actor's live Pricing tab for the current offer. Unchanged observations skipped by onlyChanges incur no result event; platform usage may still apply under your plan. Set a maximum charge in Run options to bound spending.

Source boundaries and support

The Actor respects robots directives and reads public page data only. It does not sign in, bypass access restrictions, join groups, RSVP, contact members or collect attendee identities, member profiles or access tokens. Unsupported and blocked pages are reported as failures instead of silently appearing empty.

Upstream content can be stale or change shape. Review coverage before treating a successful platform run as a complete observation. For help, open an Actor issue with the public URL, run ID and expected field, without credentials. Find related tools at Mayd It Data Tools.