A Couple of Interesting Links

An interesting post comparing Ning to a pyramid scam. Ning NCs' bill of rights. And a forum for NCs.

HALP: Private Messages

Though we desperately need the ability to see member's private messages so we can protect the teenagers on our site, we don't think Ning are ever going to give us this ability due to privacy/legal concerns.

Instead I propose that Ning give us the ability to block any content including private messages with certain strings of text in it, and display a refusal message to the user. This would function in a similar way to the junk mail warning that pops up if your message includes a key spam phrase.

We get a lot of complaints about chain letters and advertising, and we're also worried about hostile or lewd private messages being sent to people.

We would like a screen where we can enter strings to be blocked (e.g. the first sentence of a chain letter, a website address, specific swear words). This would go a long way in helping us to keep our networks safe and spam-free.

ROFL: A Very Minor Victory

This ISN'T a win, because most of the problems continue to remain the same. You can imagine this email was written through gritted teeth.

Dear Network Creator,

Since we launched the new Ning.com two weeks ago, we've heard from many of you about the increase in new members and activity you've seen as a result of it. Thank you for the kind words and we're excited to hear that many of you are benefiting from it already.

We have also heard requests from some of you who have purchased the premium service to remove Ning promotional links that we not contact members of your social network directly. As a company, we've always appreciated the open and honest dialog we have had with Network Creators on the Ning Platform. In this case, we've listened carefully to your feedback and wanted to let you know that as a Network Creator who has purchased the remove Ning promotional links premium service, we will not be sending an administrative message announcing the new Ning.com to members of your social network.

We'll continue to keep you in the loop on changes and new features for you to take advantage of on your social network on Ning and leave your communication with your members up to you.

Thanks again for using Ning and continuing to provide great feedback to us. We appreciate it.

So,

Since we launched the new Ning.com two weeks ago, we've heard from many of you about the increase in new members and activity you've seen as a result of it. Thank you for the kind words and we're excited to hear that many of you are benefiting from it already.

This would be the ROFL part. I have NOT seen ANY increase in traffic. There was a minor upward blip of maybe 5-10% for a couple of days after new Ning went live, but that could well have been due to other factors, as our traffic varies by that much naturally. Most of our traffic comes from google.

What I HAVE seen is a definite increase in spam, an increase in trolls, and an increase in banned member returns.

I've had to ban someone for trolling practically every other day since the new Ning went live. I presume this is because trolls are figuring out what a rich harvest the new Ning website provides in terms of networks to search for and cause trouble on.

I've had an increase in the amount of individuals I've had to ban due to their sending out spam and chain letters to my members. Most of them are so ignorant of our rules that they don't even get why they have been banned - which goes to show how many sites they must be joining and how much time they are actually spending on our network!

I've also had a weird increase in banned member messages. Suddenly members who were banned six months ago for spamming have come back to the site and are acting all offended because they didn't even know they'd been banned (typical spammers - poop on your site and leave).

This is NOT the kind of traffic I want!

Conversely, I am sure there are some small networks who have seen an increase in traffic. My own smaller networks have NOT seen an increase in traffic, because they are specialist sites. I have no interest in gaining members through Ning to those sites. I imagine that the small sites that have seen an increase in traffic are the parasitical COPYCAT sites that we white-label NCs hate so much.

So,

[W]e will not be sending an administrative message announcing the new Ning.com to members of your social network.

This is not the answer. The answer is to TAKE DOWN our member's pages. Our members are still going to get phished, spammed and stalked while ever they have a public profile set up for them on Ning. You can't set up a public profile for someone on a website without telling them about it!

WANT: Comments Link

We would like a link to view all of a person's comments on other people's pages in the same way as is available with discussions. Currently it is hard to track down people who are spamming or bullying other members, as most of this occurs on profile pages. With an overview of all of a person's comments to others, we would be able to get a much better idea of what kind of person we are dealing with, without having to trawl through pages and pages of profiles and old comments to try to find what they have said.

WANT: More Moderator Options

We've already posted the new moderator assignment feature as a WIN from Ning. Here are some suggestions for improving the system!

When we assign low-level moderators permissions, we would like to have the ability to prevent access to functions visible under the manage tab. We have had to hide this with a hack on our site to prevent our forum mods from tinkering with forum categories.

Currently we are unable to promote anyone to a member management position (rendering this feature useless in our case) as it would give them too much power to mass-ban or unban members. We would like to give mods the ability to ban members from the link on the member pages, but prevent access to the member lists, so that they cannot approve pending members or unban banned members. This is for a very serious reason - we have some unpleasant individuals in our banned list, and no matter how responsible we think our mods are, we cannot take the risk of exposing our site or our members to potential danger. At the same time, we would really like to hand out banning powers to a couple of our mods, so they can get rid of anyone posting offensive content FAST when we aren't around.

WIN: Moderator Levels

We really like the new moderator assignment system that was released a few weeks ago. Administrators have way too much power to screw up your site. That's fine on a small network where everyone knows each other and no one is making any money, but we weren't able to assign anyone administrator powers on our larger sites for fear of them doing serious damage.

We have been able to give a few users forum moderator rights to keep an eye on the site when we aren't around. So far, it has been working very well!

DO NOT WANT: HTML Posting

This is a major security issue for us that we can only hack away at imperfectly. At the moment, anyone can come along to our site and start remote linking to pornographic images or worse - and they have, much to the horror of some of our underage members.

We would like to have the ability to turn off HTML posting server-side so people can't get around it. Being a programmer, I know how easy it is to strip out HTML from text. I'm sure this could become a customisable feature with a checkbox or two in the management section. Perhaps with options for HTML on/off on groups, on the forum, and on the member pages.

Posting HTML is fine on small networks where there is a higher level of member trust. Bad HTML posts rarely happen to us, but when they do, it can be an absolute disaster. This feature has been on request from many NCs for months now.

Perhaps, being divorced from the front-line, the Ning team don't realise what an important feature it is.