In reply to Mike Conlon:
We get really good value out of our club Facebook group as a bit of a shop-window and as a good way of getting people a bit involved in the club before they've necessarily filled in the form, paid their subs and started coming on trips. Our group settings are:
* public to view
* only members can post
* members have to be approved by an admin.
But the only check we apply before adding people to the group is that they aren't blatant spambots (these are normally pretty obvious - joined Facebook two days ago, no friends, member of 578 groups, generic busty woman as a profile picture). So it's basically open to anyone who wants to join.
We use it officially to announce trips and socials, and unofficially to share pictures, see who's going to the wall tonight, say hello to beginners, sometimes to see who's interested in heading out on rock at the weekend and so on. On the other hand, if someone wants to share something less publicly and have more of an idea of who's going to get it then the club mailing list is fully members-only.
In about three and a half years we've never had anything like an issue with inappropriate or inflammatory posting. I guess we'd probably ban someone from posting if we thought they were seriously disrupting the group, maybe with a warning if we thought they weren't doing it deliberately. But to date we haven't even had anyone getting huffy.
Post edited at 11:26