[yaysloths]

1. Thanks for the lower-case tip; actually not sure how they ended up in all caps. I’ll blame it on the cat.
2. I hadn’t heard of robots=none either, but a fairly net-savvy friend said it was easier than entering the various individual instructions (since apparently there are some obscure ones besides noindex, nofollow?). A Google search turns up pages that seem to agree (see # 4), but maybe I should change it back to be safe.
3. The intranet idea is a neat one, but I think it’s beyond the scope of my capabilities right now (inasmuch as I have no idea how to go about it). I think I’d feel ok with just the Hidden Forums plugin, but I don’t know how to configure things such that it doesn’t keep crashing the site when someone not authorized (or not authorized yet) tries to log in. I don’t know PHP well enough to manipulate the code such that a person would just be directed to a “sorry, this site is private” page instead of causing the infinite redirect loop. Bummer.