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I'm running a small (< 20) group of people. We organize day-long events every weekend, where new members are also welcome. Anyone can join our Facebook group where we advertise our events.

At our latest event, a person showed up who seemed to be cool in the beginning, but ended up making the rest of the day miserable to some (most) of the regulars.

Without going into too much detail, this was due to one of his personality traits which I'm pretty sure he won't be able to change any time soon. I'd like to point out that the person is friendly and 'cool', but pretty much unbearable after an hour or two. He didn't do anything outrageous or inappropriate, but he was extremely annoying after a while.

After the event, I sent him an email, politely suggesting that he might not fit in well with us because of this particular behavior. Unfortunately, the message wasn't clear enough. His response was something along the lines of "Haha, yeah I can [be like that] sometimes. Anyways, I enjoyed the [event], I'll be happy to join you next time!".

How do I tell this person that I would like him to leave our group, without embarrassing him? (Or at least minimizing the embarrassment.)

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    Maybe related (not a dupe): communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/q/874/83
    – Monica Cellio
    Sep 7, 2015 at 20:13
  • @MonicaCellio Thanks for the link! That question describes a situation very similar to ours.
    – Marton
    Sep 7, 2015 at 21:10
  • Very similar situation, but you're able to tell him to go away while we aren't, so different approaches.
    – Monica Cellio
    Sep 7, 2015 at 22:10

1 Answer 1

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Ultimately you may need to exclude this person from the discussions about the next event so that they don't know when or where it's happening, but with the discussions happening in an open Facebook group that could be tricky.

You could create a 2nd group that specifically about the organisation of the events and make that closed and don't approve this persons request to join. This has the major disadvantage that many of your other members won't want to join two groups to do something that they used to do with one, and will more than likely cost you members. You can't even change the current group from "open" to "closed" without causing the same sort of problems. The current members remain in the group - as this help page on Facebook on changing group permissions implies. So if you really don't want this person in your group, you'll have to change the status then remove this person and reject his requests to rejoin - which all seems a little mean and over the top.

What you should probably do is organise a face to face meeting before the next event when you can discuss their behaviour and how it affects the other group members, rather than trying to do so over e-mails. You'll be able to be less confrontational and both of you should be aware of tone of voice and body language - both of which are missing from online conversations.

Unfortunately there's no easy solution to this one.

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    Thank you for the answer. Yes, I guess talking to him and explaining the issue clearly is the least harmful solution. Creating a new FB group would just complicate things for all the other group members.
    – Marton
    Sep 7, 2015 at 21:42
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    @Marton Do not miss that he responded "I recognize that (my) behavior", so he may be open to addressing this.
    – user732
    Sep 8, 2015 at 9:56
  • @JanDoggen - I was thinking the same thing, but even though he mentioned he may have this problem, he didn't offer to improve on his behavior and basically insisted he was going to return. Maybe he needs it spelled-out for him.
    – JeffO
    Sep 11, 2015 at 21:00
  • I have done this. I created a new group and specifically excluded the persons who were making the group events a misery. It worked well until they found out about the second group.
    – Underverse
    Oct 9, 2015 at 6:34

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