A Note From One Of Your Louise Penny Book Club Group Admins
Hello my friend,
Many years ago, I created our group on Facebook after being introduced to Three Pines by a lovely neighbour who spent her entire career working for the Vancouver Public Library. It was during a chance encounter while I was out on a walk with my dog that we had a brief chat and she mentioned her current read: a Louise Penny book. She emphasized her special appreciation for the Gamache series, how she would read and reread them, and how she would always preorder the next one in the series without hesitation. How she said that she would happily move to Three Pines despite never wanting to live in a small community and loving her life in our big, beautiful city on the west coast of Canada. I knew then that I had to read the series and learn everything there was to know about Three Pines.
Over the years, I have watched our group grow into what it is today – a very special community of talented, compassionate, intelligent, well-read, kind, interesting and thoughtful readers. We have come together over our shared love of a particular author, but we have shared much more of ourselves than just our thoughts on the books. We’ve read some very touching stories, seen beautiful art, shared laughs, and participated in some incredibly insightful discussions. We have grown into a very special group, and I know that I’m not alone in recognizing the quality of what we have.
And we’ve experienced some tougher moments as well. When I first started the group, it was a new and lonely space where I could only hope someone would somehow miraculously notice it and want to join. Anyone who wanted to join the group was automatically allowed in, no questions asked. But as the group grew in popularity, it started to attract people who joined for reasons other than the love of Louise Penny’s books. Luckily, I had recruited some of my closest friends as fellow administrators to help manage the group, and together, we discovered that our little group had sadly become a target for scammers.
After our first discovery of a scammer who came extremely close to acquiring both trust and money from an unsuspecting member, our priorities as admins for the group changed dramatically. Our number one priority since that moment has been to keep our little group safe. This meant that our participation within the group discussions decreased as our admin responsibilities increased. (On average, we receive hundreds of requests before we even log in every morning and then hundreds more throughout the day. We admins spend 2 to 5 hours daily reviewing participation requests, assessing participants, blocking bots/scammers and responding to member requests/complaints.)
Our new responsibilities included scanning through the profiles of all our members to ban and block profiles that had obvious signs of being fake. The number of members at that time was small in comparison to our membership today, but still, there were thousands. We also introduced challenge questions with the intention of helping us identify true Penny fans. Those questions have changed a number of times, as we discovered fake profiles answering questions correctly. Well, one of our first questions was “How many pines?” so we weren’t trying to be too tricky! Still, this was well before the Amazon TV series aired, and at the time, it did help us weed out the laziest of scammers. As our group grew larger and as the books and TV series grew in popularity, the scammers became more sophisticated. And we have tried to keep one step ahead every time we’ve seen a new scam appear. (If you’re interested in more details, you can read about our latest battle with the copyright infringers and how we had to become amateur sleuths to catch them.)
Over the past few years, we have also seen many changes to the Facebook platform that threaten the safety of our group. Facebook has made a number of changes to group settings that have impacted the way we organize and protect the group. We have felt a push towards automation and artificial intelligence, and so far, we have resisted the prompts to have AI moderate our group. We prefer to review profiles ourselves, not only to confirm authenticity, but also so we can ban profiles confirmed to be fake. We have served as admins for various groups and pages on Facebook for over 15 years now, managing communities with millions of members, and the number of profiles that we’ve banned from our spaces is easily in the tens of thousands. But we’ve given up on pages where there is no control over who can participate. We could spend every hour of every day of the week banning profiles, and still there would be spam.
For our Louise Penny group, we have thankfully been able to maintain some control over participation. Every single member of our group has been reviewed and granted permission to post and comment. With over 88,000 members, we can only guess at the amount of time we’ve committed to monitoring our group. So please know that although we may not always have the time to review and participate in discussions, we are present, working in the background.
The technological changes on Facebook’s platform that have taken place, and no doubt will continue to push forward, have also had major implications for us. Content has disappeared unexpectedly, and the ways we set up important posts so that they would remain easily accessible to members have also been lost.
We’ve worked with a large number of members who have experienced technical glitches and have seen their posts/comments suddenly disappear or have tried to post/comment but have been locked out. More recently, “achievement levels” were automatically added to individual group members as a way of ranking participation. Changes in how the majority of people see posts and the types of posts that get presented obviously serve Facebook’s objectives, which, ultimately, makes it more difficult for you to see content from the groups and friends you’ve chosen to follow. Other changes may occur in the future that affect the way we manage or even maintain the group.
These are some of the reasons why we created our own private website for our local book club. And this, in turn, led us to think about ways in which we could preserve the valuable thoughts, creations and resources that are shared every day in our Facebook group and make it more easily accessible. And now we have turned that idea into this website, Book Club Friends, which we thought to share with you. We now consider Book Club Friends to be a companion site to our group. It is designed to collect, save, and present all the best information shared on the group page and deliver it in a reliable and universally accessible way.
Almost four years ago, one of our members asked us to find a way to organize author and book recommendations in a more efficient and effective way than the frequent request posts which get hundreds of responses, often filled with repeat recommendations. So we wanted to create a solution that would empower members to be able to continually update the list of recommendations with new books and authors in one central, easily accessible location.
This is the heart of Book Club Friends – a highly curated site filled only with authors and books recommended by our members. We’ve listed over 2,500 books from our groups’ most highly recommended authors so far, and this is only the beginning. We have many more authors and books to add, and we welcome more recommendations from you. The more recommendations we receive for a particular author or book, the higher their priority will be to add them to the site.
We hope you will embrace this site and know that we created it with you and our other special community members in mind. It has been a labour of love, and we wholeheartedly thank all of you who have already supported the site by sharing your stories, your recommendations, and your talents.
We invite you to take a little sneak peek…

When Admins Turn Into Sleuths
As you may remember, we have had several discussions about fake Louise Penny groups on Facebook – those fake groups that have tacked on “Community” to the end of the names of the authentic Louise Penny groups. The same ones who have stolen original artwork, thoughts, insights, posts, or questions and posted that content to their groups and presented it as if it were their own and they were the creators of that content. The same ones run by people who clearly have never read a Louise Penny book and are only interested in selling unlicensed merchandise.
We became aware of them last year after they used one of our members’ artworks as their cover photo for their group and refused to remove the image or give credit to the artist. We continued to do what we could to block the people responsible. Often, they would lurk in our list of members, which enabled us to find and block them easily. We searched for these group admins and all of the people who posted stolen content to their groups and blocked everyone we could. But still, we had members complain to us about their posts being stolen.
Last month, another discussion about stolen posts arose. Again, we combed through the offending groups looking to identify the people responsible and then searched through our membership to find offendings profiles. Once again, we found a few and blocked them. And again, we knew that we were just playing whack-a-mole and that it would just be a matter of time before the copyright infringement issue would resurface.
But then we decided to dig a little deeper and discovered a solution that isn’t readily available to group admins. We looked into how the Facebook database operates and discovered a way to block every single person associated with the offending groups.
And that’s when the real investigative work began into uncovering the whole network of offending profiles. During our investigation, there was one moment when we followed one tiny clue which led to a method by which we could identify each person in the network. It was only then that we realized the incredible extent of the network. We saw just how diverse and widespread the network is, extending across different interests and communities.
We felt like the sleuths in the mystery novels we read. Suddenly everything had been exposed, and we knew that we had finally gotten one step ahead of the thieves. We spent several days, and for some of the admins, a few sleepless nights, identifying profiles and blocking them.
After we had completed our “search and block” mission, we kept an eye on the fake groups. We believe that we’ve successfully identified everyone in their network because the constant theft of content from our group has stopped and we have not seen one single stolen post for over a month. We think we’ve won the battle for now. But we know that the next challenge is just around the corner. It always is.
Why are we sharing this story? Firstly, for those who had content stolen, we want you to know that we understand how upsetting it was to you. And we wanted to do what we could to preserve our open and welcoming environment while maintaining as much security as we could enforce. Secondly, while on this mission, we came up with an idea to translate our investigation into the theft of our group members’ Intellectual Property into something positive – a fun challenge for our mystery-loving book club friends who might be interested in putting their detection skills to the test. And because we also received a lot of feedback from members who enjoyed our challenge questions to join our Louise Penny group, we combined the idea of answering book-themed questions with the idea of finding targets to create our “Solve the Mystery” Challenge.
September 21, 2024
Hello again my friend,
When we created our book club all those years ago, we envisioned an online version of our real, in-person book club meetings that we admins had been hosting. Now that our group has grown to its current size, and due to some of the recent interactions we’ve experienced, we believe that it’s time to make some changes. We hope you will embrace these changes and help us foster a kind, respectful and compassionate community that reflects the spirit of Three Pines.
From this point forward, we would like you to envision yourself as a guest in our home, invited for an in-person book club meeting. Every time you visit our group page (our home) or see one of our posts in your FB feed, please treat that post as if it were a single conversation taking place in the corner of our very large living room. And within that room are multiple other conversations in the form of individual posts with their own comment threads, where groups of members are hovered together in circles, chatting away like old friends reunited.
Please keep in mind that we admins, as hosts of this meeting, welcome you with open arms, asking only that you treat our other guests with kindness and respect. You are free to mingle and eavesdrop on every conversation. Some chats are serious book club discussions requiring deeper thought and research. Some are lighter in tone and filled with high-pitched giggles and stomach-aching belly laughs. If you can’t find a chat worth joining, you are invited to start your own conversation based on any topic that interests you. You are here, in our home, to enjoy yourself, to meet other interesting people, to learn about their perspectives on things that matter to you.
In this setting, do you think it would be appropriate for anyone to interrupt a group in mid conversation to tell them that they shouldn’t discuss whatever they’re talking about? Or that you’ve heard other groups discussing this topic already and you’d like them to stop?
Please keep in mind that we have repeatedly announced that guests are welcome to chat about anything they’d like. Politics? Ducks? Rabbits? Actors? Copper Penny Salad? Yes. We encourage open discussion on any topic in our book club. Discussion allows us to learn new things and new perspectives, and we believe that is a good thing. Some discussions on lighter topics allow us to share a laugh or two, and we believe that finding as much joy in life as possible is also a good thing. We understand that not everyone enjoys all topics. That sometimes, emotions can run high. That the way people behave on social media differs from how they would behave in person. So we are asking you to bring your in-person manners to our home, which just happens to be located online.
The great thing about social media is that you can be abrupt in turning away from a chat you’re not interested in. In real life, that would be rude, but online, nobody even knows that you’re eavesdropping unless you announce your presence. On FB, there are several tools you can use to optimize your experience, and we have put together a guide to help you use the tools available to your advantage. If you are one of the many who think that there are never any posts discussing the books, then you may be suffering from the result of FB algos that sometimes hide or bury content. We post discussion questions on LP’s books as well as questions for our member-selected Book of the Month almost every single day, and have been doing so for over a year. In addition, many members post interesting book-related questions. Most of these questions receive very few responses and very little attention. If you would like to see more of this type of content, you do need to like, share, comment or react in some way to the posts. This will teach the FB algo to show you more of that type of post. Conversely, reacting to posts that you dislike will teach the FB algo to show you more of the type of content that you dislike. It really is best to scroll past anything that you are not interested in.
We know that this note will not be read by our entire group. That perhaps even those who read it may have a difficult time unlearning online habits. So we are asking for your help because we cannot read every comment under every thread, unfortunately. The “Report to admin” button will work to draw our attention to any problem, but better yet, we would appreciate it if everyone could step up and work together with us as a community. Please help us share this message. Please remind other members to be kind and respectful. To listen and learn or scroll away and pick their battles. Give them gentle guidance to another chat in a different part of the room, or invite them to start their own topic of conversation. We’re not fans of the idea of our guests leaving to start their own meeting spaces, we hope we can find common ground with everyone. Imagine if Three Pines villagers told Ruth to go start her own village of Two Pines; how we would miss out on so much in her absence.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation. What makes our group wonderful is the kind, compassionate and respectful spirit of Three Pines that exists in all of us. We share a very special bond, my friend. Goodness exists.
Questions? Contact us, we are always happy to help if we can.
If you missed the first note from admins, you can read it here.