Would you prefer our online community to be an open or closed forum?

There are pros and cons to both.  I like both, but prefer mixed.  So maybe you only have certain parts of the board be public and once you become a member you get access to the rest, a common thing on many boards.  From everything I've seen and read I don't think that is possible on this board software.  It would have been better if they used a more mainstream software.

So reasons to keep open.  Inclusivity.  There is another charity that I interact with and there website and community is the complete opposite to here. They are not inclusive at all.

Reasons to close it off.  Privacy.  People post on here and anyone can scrape that information and given enough data points can probably match it to an actual name and address.  Facebook and Google presumably both have that capability.  I admit to being guarded at times when posting on threads for that exact reason.  Sometimes I will make a response more generic so as not to identify someone exactly.

I don't know what the right answer is, so I won't vote.

There are pros and cons to both.  I like both, but prefer mixed.  So maybe you only have certain parts of the board be public and once you become a member you get access to the rest, a common thing on many boards.  From everything I've seen and read I don't think that is possible on this board software.  It would have been better if they used a more mainstream software.

So reasons to keep open.  Inclusivity.  There is another charity that I interact with and there website and community is the complete opposite to here. They are not inclusive at all.

Reasons to close it off.  Privacy.  People post on here and anyone can scrape that information and given enough data points can probably match it to an actual name and address.  Facebook and Google presumably both have that capability.  I admit to being guarded at times when posting on threads for that exact reason.  Sometimes I will make a response more generic so as not to identify someone exactly.

I don't know what the right answer is, so I won't vote.