How to invite a group of "charter members" before I make the forum public?

[Mr Lucky]

3. If I had a Charter Member with alternate group as "Registered", they were the same as #2.

4. I had to de-couple Charter Member from "Registered", and assign my dummy accounts to Charter Member,

Something is very wrong here if I’m understanding correctly

Everyone must have registered as primary group.

Otherwise it’s unlikely the permission system will work, or at least finding support may be difficult.

 

[Mendalla]

I suppose I could simply Uncheck "Enable Registration" and no one new could register except whoever (e.g. Charter Members) I registered via the Admin panel....

Which, IIRC, is how we did it back when we started Wondercafe2. We left registration off and did manual registrations for a bunch of members coming over from the original Wondercafe and then had some of them login to start some threads prior to "go live". But someone else was doing the tech work back then so I don't really recall how we set everything up beyond that. I was an admin but was busy writing board rules and running polls and such.

 

[Stiff]

I guess I'm confused what charter members are but sure sounds good.

"Charter members"—that does sound good, doesn't it? way more cachet than a trophy—are really just folks who want to participate in a soft open and help me build the board. Once the board opens, they'll have more privileges than other groups (like longer post edit times, etc.).