Facebook

[TheOstrich]

Is it me, or are Facebook getting increasingly restrictive about casual browsing .....

There is a "public group" for Gillingham, Dorset which is part advertising, part local news, part gossip. In theory, anyone should be able to browse. But from 01/01/17, all posts are "whitened" out and invisible unless you are signed into Facebook.
There was a trend in 2016 for previously-open Facebook sites to be accompanied by increasingly hectoring notices to sign up or log in, but at least you could still browse sites, with a little difficulty. But this latest move puts an end to all that.

Personally, I'm not signed up with Facebook, and prefer on balance to remain that way, simply because I don't like putting too much personal detail out there on the net ...... so I now have a decision to make, to sign up or not. It'll probably be "not".

[Kaz]

Being already signed up to FB, so not a casual browser, it's hard for me to say Ossie

[Suff]

Last time I signed up someone to FB, it was whinging about real names. My cousin wanted it for his company. So I thought for a second and made first name the company name, last name the company name and the email address as [company]@[domain.com]

When I signed up it accepted anything. So I was Barking Mad.. Along with a few other barking mad's.

You could always create some variation of noddy.toytown@gmail.com then call yourself Noddy Toytown. DOB, 01/01/1900. Or some variation of the same.

FB is fairly intelligent but, due to the crazy nature of our names and email addresses, it can't be too draconian. I'm sure, however, that it won't accept F... Y... as a name which I would dearly like to say to FB.

So there are options there. You certainly don't have to tell it the truth and I certainly would NOT give it ANY of my particulars as I have no intention of ever using it's services.

Mind you I did the same with Yahoo 6 months after they started and had a problem when Yahoo refused to enter my "real" DOB when I told them they did not have it. They told me "you can't change your DOB". I told them, "You assume I trusted you enough to give you the real one"...