What amych said.

Sorry about new user registration being broken. Once the new board is up, that will be fixed. Unfortunately, I'm working nearly solo on a critical project at work that's taking up the time I need to be spending on my other critical project at work.

It is has broken for a very long time, don't feel any pressure here. We really appreciate your help, Gud.

Don't mean to put pressure on you, Gud! It's not really your responsibility, and I appreciate you putting in so much effort. I really just wanted to put forth the idea that if there is a workaround that requires some sort of low tech work, I'd be happy to help.

Secret FB group - yes. It's an extension of the board and should be invite-only.

I agree with what seems to be the general consensus. FB group should be Secret and continue to be used as an annex to the main Board. I'm not comfortable with our FB group being visible to all of FB, nor with taking in new members randomly through FB.

I don't want to miss out on cool new people, either, though, so as long as our New Users function is borked, I'd support a brief questionnaire or some other screening tool for potential new members through FB, if that's what others want also.

With it marked Secret no one will see it unless one of us invites them in. It won't be a suggested group for people anymore.

I haven't had a Facebook account for a few years.

I agree with going Secret for now as a least-possible-damage quick fix until we've had a chance to discuss.

I also prefer Secret for the long term, because (a) the facebook group is an auxiliary to the board and not a general-purpose Buffy discussion group, and I can easily imagine a future where a ton of people come in that way and the fb _loses_ the usefulness it currently has for "is the board down" and "hey, if you haven't checked in for a while, please check Beep Me", and (b) facebook is a motherfucking cesspool of toxicity and actual evil, perhaps even a hellmouth, so I'd rather not see it become a primary discussion place with a whole different but overlapping crew of people (however lovely they may be).

I think amyth is right.

Not to mention, most people use some iteration of their real-life names on FB (including most Buffistas). While Buffistas aren't really a group where you see a lot of usernames of the Elmo_Pelt79 ilk, most people are less identifiable here, than over there.

I don't really know where I was going with that, except if I still had FB, I'd be fine with people who got to know me as Topic!Cindy over here, figuring out that in actuality, I'm really international supermodel Cindy Crawford.

But I wouldn't necessarily want everyone who follows me, international supermodel Cindy Crawford, to track me to B.org.

To "yes and" that thought, FB is a less-public forum than here, so I might (and have) put stuff up there that I wouldn't want to be findable in the way that posts on a public forum (like here) are.

Oh! We need to name a new Goodbye and Good Riddance thread! Bring on the good names!