Private or not private boards? that is the question.

[administrator]

Hi all,
For the moment you will see that the general board and the 3 boards below it are for public use.  This means that guests (non registered people) can view all of the posts on these boards but cannot reply to them.  This encourages registration and to some extent less incidents of hit and runs. 

Now i've been going through this in my head and i think if the board was private there would be a few problems.
1.  Who is invited to a private board?
2.  How do we know this person isn't a spy?
3.  Having it private means the board isn't visible at all to a guest who may be geuinely interested in these topics (but how would they know? they cant even see it)

Having it public.
1. promotes people to join and build our community.
2. promotes information transfer. the more with these philosophies in the world, the better right.
3. people can see all the boards.

Theres is always room for private groups as in once people are familiar with each other and have say a birth year or month in common for their kids then i could create  a private board for you guys.  This is an idea that has worked very well for my own AP birth group.

So what does everyone think?

TIA for your input,
Megs (Administrator)

[Karen + Greta]

I think the only negative would be a BBC spy, but Im long past caring about them and I think they are too.  So, I think the benefit of new faces would outweigh that.  But again it would be nice to have a place where it's just the original group.  Hmmmmm......

[kokonutmama]

There's another BBS like this one where there are private boards that automatically become visible once you reach a certain number of posts.  I think (though I haven't posted there enough to know for sure) that these are different versions of the 'public' boards.  Like there's an EC discussion board, then after a while you can get into the private ec board so you can post pics of your kid on the can without too much worry of some sicko taking advantage.

[pixie81]

I think for a group like ours i always saw it as remaining private.  I don't feel the need for new members in that group but i think the other boards should remain public.  I'm not all that worried about spys atleast to begin with.

megs