FLGS, Communities, and online presence

I don't really know where else to post this, since it's not really about TTRPGs per se. Whatever.



I've been doing some work helping out a FLGS with their online presence. Around here every FLGS has at least a web site, and most of them have some kind of forum. The forums get used for everything from discussions to event scheduling to notifications to campaign logs for groups that play in the store. The extent to which the forum software gets tortured into doing this is often gruesome.



It's not any more difficult to install a social networking package than a forum package, but I've been getting a lot of resistance to the suggestion - despite the rather obvious fact that with internal groups, pages, friend-ing, event calendars, notifications, forums etc. most social networking software is much more aligned to what these people are trying to do with their vanilla forum software.



So, I throw the question out to you, tRPGs folks. Imagine something like facebook without the worrying privacy issues and unpredictably mutating user interface. Would you prefer something like that to a forum package, assuming you're involved with your FLGS' online community? Why or why not?

FLGS, Communities, and online presence