Anywho -
It actually isn't unprofessional when the goal is to protect the members from some organizer who might be malicious in nature. There are a lot of rules and guidance around how organizers should do things, and Support's main goal is making sure the general members of Meetup aren't preyed upon. You're idea of giving a heads up, what are the parameters around before action is taken? 24 hours? 48 hours? A week? What if this post went "i was on vacation for a week so didn't read the email, and they deleted my group, how could they!!". It wouldn't matter. TOS are TOS.
If this person was malicious how much negative should the community accept? In that time how much spamming of a product the creator is trying to sell happening? How much misleading around the member base is there? You need to deal with these things as quick as possible, and the TOS exists to give people the framework of usage. A violation of a TOS(on any site) is just that, and it needs to be dealt with equally across violations. Support can and will make mistakes. That's human nature. THis isn't one of those. The poster in this case was even told they could re-create the group because at this point the old one is considered poisoned, and not to be trusted. Given Meetup has been doing this for over 10 years now, I'd like to think they have these policies pretty well grounded in reality and experience.
Is the recurring vs one-time distinction (and, more importantly, that one-time meetings are NOT welcome) made clearly? I realize that they say "Meetups are ...." on the help page, but it seems like this group really got screwed.
This meeting was for people who already followed a podcast, as part of a local software development community. There might have been later meet-ups. As long as it is clearly stated what the frequency is, does it matter if the meetups are once a month, once a year, or once a decade? You could still have a passionate community of people who want to use your system to help them organize in-person meetings.
On top of any policy / communication quirks, there should have been technical tools in place to ensure that the organizers' hard work was not lost.
