Krewebacchus

Krewebacchus is the Krewe’s purpose-built membership system — the procedural backbone that sits between a prospective ChewbacchanALIEN typing their name into a form and a fully-affiliated member rolling under the banner of an approved subkrewe on parade day. It lives at krewebacchus.org, runs continuously, and is, for the moment, the singular destination for membership business of any kind.

Before its construction, the Overlords managed the roster through a rotating cast of spreadsheets, calendar reminders, and quietly desperate Facebook Messenger threads. The arrangement was characterful but did not, by any reasonable definition, scale. Krewebacchus exists so the Overlords can return to the more pressing work of organising a parade.

What Krewebacchus does

Each member’s profile in the system handles, broadly:

• Account creation and ongoing profile management.
• Annual membership dues — purchase, renewal, and the recognition of Lifetime status.
• Child memberships, added under a guardian’s account.
• Subkrewe affiliation — joining, switching, and applying to closed or by-referral subkrewes.
• Add-on purchases: Chewbacchanal VIP upgrades, contraption parking, and the occasional limited-edition extra.

For dues themselves — the standing rate, the early-bird discount schedule, youngling rates, refund policy — the canonical entry is Become a ChewbacchanALIEN. Krewebacchus is where those numbers actually change hands; the Guide does not duplicate them here.

Account rules

A small number of structural conventions hold the system together. Members who follow them have, generally, a quieter time of it.

• The email address is the identity. Each Krewebacchus account is keyed to the email used to create it. Members are encouraged to use a personal address they actually check — not a shared subkrewe address, not an old workplace one, not the placeholder one set up in 2014 and never opened since — because every communication from the Krewe arrives there.
• Each adult member has their own account. Members aged 18 and over create individual accounts and pay their own dues. Sharing accounts, however well-meaning, breaks the affiliation model and tends to confuse the captains.
• Younglings live under a guardian. Members under 18 should not create their own accounts. They are added as child members under an adult guardian’s profile, and the guardian purchases the child’s dues from there.
• Lifetime members are recognised by email. Lifetime members create an account using the email the Krewe has on file for them; the system identifies them automatically and waives annual dues. Members whose Lifetime status fails to register are encouraged to email krewebacchus@chewbacchus.org, and reconciliation will be handled by hand.

Dues, payment, and add-ons

Krewebacchus owns the membership data and the membership state; payment itself is handled through Stripe, the Krewe’s secure payment processor. The two systems converse with one another — dues paid through Stripe become, almost immediately, a confirmed membership inside Krewebacchus.

Annual dues must be paid (or Lifetime status confirmed) before most add-ons unlock. Chewbacchanal VIP upgrades and contraption parking passes are purchased separately, inside Krewebacchus, after the primary membership is in place. The Overlords have arranged the order of operations this way deliberately; reversing it has, in the past, produced exciting weekend support tickets.

Affiliating with a subkrewe

Once a member is paid up, the next procedural step is subkrewe affiliation — the requirement that every dues-paying member belong to a registered subkrewe. The subkrewes themselves, with their respective admission policies, are catalogued in the Subkrewes entry. From a procedural standpoint, the four policies behave as follows:

• Open — clicking Join inside Krewebacchus completes affiliation immediately. No queue, no review.
• Open with restrictions — affiliation is also immediate, but contingent on the subkrewe’s stated criteria. Members are expected to read those criteria before clicking, and to continue meeting them after.
• Closed — affiliation requires captain approval. The request appears in the captain’s queue inside Krewebacchus, where it is approved or declined at the captain’s discretion.
• By referral — as Closed, with the addition of a referral field. The captain reviews both the request and the named referrer.

Captains review pending requests on their own schedules; patience, while not constitutionally required, is nonetheless appreciated.

For captains

Subkrewes that rolled the previous parade year are pre-populated in Krewebacchus and pre-approved for the upcoming one. Activating a subkrewe for the new year requires three steps from at least one of its registered captains:

• Log into Krewebacchus.
• Locate the subkrewe in the directory and claim it.
• Confirm whether the subkrewe is rolling this year, and update its profile — description, admission policy, captain roster, contact details.

A subkrewe is considered fully active — and the captain’s full member roster becomes visible inside Krewebacchus — once at least one registered captain has both paid annual dues and claimed the subkrewe profile. Members may affiliate with a pre-populated subkrewe before the captain has activated it; the experience is smoother, however, when activation happens promptly. The Overlords gently, repeatedly, and with diminishing patience encourage promptness.

Support

For Krewebacchus questions — account issues, payment problems, Lifetime member recognition failures, captain access — the available routes are:

• The Krewebacchus FAQ — the questions that arrive most frequently, answered ahead of time.
• Discord — for real-time conversation with both members and the team behind the system: discord.gg/kpkDTERm.
• Email — for technical issues, bug reports, and Lifetime member reconciliation: krewebacchus@chewbacchus.org.