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.

DO NOT WANT: Ning Spam

After the launch of the new Ning.com, the SPAM from "vulture" Network Creators has started pouring in. Not only to my members, but to me as well. [...]

Now these "vulture" Network Creators can simply search Ning.com for members and add them as friends without even being on my network at all. My members are confused since most of them have never even heard of Ning. Once they accept the friend requests, they start receiving invites to other competing networks, content, etc. The worst part about it is that I, as a network creator, have no control over this!

Writes one member of the network creators forum.

This is what members receive when they are friend requested through Ning.com:

=======================

User has added you as a friend on Ning

To accept this friend request, visit:
http://www.ning.com/main/friendrequests?u=x1x1x1x1x1

--
Ning enables you to create and discover social networks for the most important people and interests in your life. To control which emails you receive from Ning, go to:
http://www.ning.com/settings/emailnotifications

Writes someone else.

I wish they would let us leave ..and make it easy ..

I can;t delete my invited on ning.com i try and they keep coming back ...

I am so livid,,, I have to stop typing before I put my foot in my mouth ...

I'm not the only investigating replacement options for Ning...

With all the new social networking software thats becoming less expensive and it is the net. [...] Have decided finally to just create my own website, and maybe if ning stabilizes use them as a just group like yahoo group, or list serve. Not see them as a social network anymore.

DO NOT WANT: PR BS

The number one request we consistently hear from Network Creators is that they would like an effective way to drive new members to their social networks. The number one request we hear from members is that they would like a way to discover new social networks to join. We think the approach we're taking here with Ning.com will address both requests while not getting in the way of your relationship with your members. - Quote from Ning posted to the Signature Campaign

With all due respect, this is a big pile of baloney from Ning's PR department.

First off, any decent NC already knows how to drive members to their networks. It's with search engine ranking and targeted advertising. So this "number one request" can only be coming from one set of people - the freebie, parasitical amateur NCs who set up networks and then look around wondering where to get some members (ah! I know, I'll go and steal them off another network!) Stealing members and shuffling them between sites adds NOTHING to Ning's membership base. It just annoys the good NCs who are actually bringing in new members!

I am an NC. I DO NOT WANT members from the Ning network joining my site. They are spammers and troublemakers. They join my site, they advertise a bunch of other Ning sites, they friend a bunch of people, then they spam them with invites to other sites.

I doubt very much that the "number one request" from members is how to discover new networks. Here are my member's top requests:

- How do I stop all these emails coming to me?
- Please ban this idiot from your site!
- I don't know how to do BLAH.

Not once has someone ever emailed me asking to find out about other social networks. That's because the people who want to find other social networks already know how to find them, and the people on my site are there because they want to be there.

All this is going to do is fill out some of our smaller, copycat networks. People will join them, then they will get fed up of trying to look at six networks every day instead of one. They will hear all kinds of nasty made-up stories about us from the embittered spammer NCs we have banned who run these networks. They will spread a bunch of animosity around, and we will end up at war with the smaller networks, actively banning people for being part of them.

WIN: Ning Petition!

I do not know who set this up, it was NOT me. It's a public petition requesting Ning back down over the violation of their white-label system.

The Ning company has made decisions recently that has alienated its Network Creators and put the hard work of its Network Creators in jeopardy.

Ning promised to give control and ownership of networks to Network Creators. If members wished to pay additional fees, that could remove all references to Ning.

To join our networks, members had to first join Ning, We accepted this; it had a similar feel to "Open Id". Ning promised us that they would never try to steal our members or try to behave as if they "owned " our networks.

Then followed a series of T.O.S. changes, closing their much-touted open API, and shutting off Network Creator access to their data, and many other ill-conceived changes.

Now Ning has decided to try and become Facebook by stealing the members that Network Creators worked hard to build. Their most recent changes would negate the hundreds, in some cases thousands of dollars that Network Creators have put into the networks.

In the process, Ning has exposed our members private information without their consent and knowledge. They conviently changed their Terms of Service before this change, but our members were not aware of this because we were not made aware.

Ning refuses to sell current network owners their member data so that they can move elsewhere. When Ning reneged on their promise to welcome adult networks and then booted adult networks, those network creators were given full access to their content. This proves that it can be done even though Ning currently claims that it can not. Ning also refuses to offer any alternatives for those unhappy with the changes other than to lose months of hard work.

To top it off, Ning has recently decided to charge astronomical support fees when they already offer little support. Support, by the way, also means listening to what your customers need.

Sign the Ning petition here!

http://www.gopetition.com/online/26144.html

DO NOT WANT: TOS and the New Ning

We were very early adopters of Ning. We never would have set up our sites under the current TOS. Under the "new Ning", our members aren't even ours anymore, they appear in a public directory and are informed about all of the other Ning networks they could join. Why bother growing our site? I feel like I'm fighting the tide here, and wasting my time working for Ning instead of working for myself.

Many other network creators have already said this, but I was planning on setting up another potentially large social network with Ning. I am now not going to launch it and will go off and find a better solution for it. I think the only way I can do this properly now without fear of a big corporation playing theTOS-shimmy is to write my own code.

It seems as though Ning is only interested in keeping members who set up networks for 5-20 people, who aren't internet-savvy, are teenagers or amateurs, or simply don't care about member privacy.

Needless to say, this is a major white-labelling FAIL and Ning are going to lose business because of it. They don't seem to understand what NCs of large sites really want.

White-Label FAIL: The New Ning

If it wasn't bad enough that our members are already getting spammed to death by member vultures, now Ning have created the "new Ning", and everyone has had a public profile page foisted onto them on the Ning site, whether they want one or not. Everyone is going to have an email sent to them to direct them to their new public Ning profile, whether they knew they were a member of Ning or not, whether they belonged to a white-label site or not, whether they belonged to a public or a private network or not.

When white-label NCs started protesting about this on the network creators site, one of them posted this support response from Ning:

Because you purchased the "Remove Ning Promotional Links" premium service, when your members are on your social network, they wont in any way be directed to or linked to their activity feed on Ning.com. This behavior remains unchanged from today.

Today, if your members were to go to Ning.com on their own and entered the name of your social network in our search box, your social network would appear in our search results. Additionally, if they were to sign in to Ning.com with their Ning ID, they would see that they are a member of your social network and any other social networks of which they are a member. With the new Ning.com, the only change to this behavior is that members will be able to see the activity across all of the social networks of which they are members and we will provide recommendations of new networks for them to join. Network Creators' Signature Campaign Thread

This isn't quite the truth as it stands. They left out the bit where everyone can see everyone else's profile on Ning and everyone who signs up to your white-label site has a public profile on Ning.

What does "they wont in any way be directed to or linked to their activity feed on Ning.com" actually mean? Does this mean white-label members won't get an email sent out? Or are they just talking about putting loads of links into the free networks to show your member feed on Ning?

What happens if the signature campaign is successful, and white-label members don't get an email sent to them? Not sending out the email is not the solution. You simply can't leave people with a public profile on display that they don't even know about. It's a privacy and security nightmare.

How Ning can help:

DO NOT set up profiles for members of white-label sites on Ning.com until members find Ning by themselves!

Leaving FAIL: The New Ning

Picking up on the privacy fail issue, my poor member who had to leave ALL OF NING because someone found her from another network and is "attacking" her, here is the process she has to go through to delete her Ning ID.

She has to go to her profile and find a little tab in the settings section called "deactivate". There is a button there that says "deactivate". You would think when you clicked it, your account would be deactivated.

But no. When you click it you get a message saying, "please contact the help center to deactivate your account."

WTF?!

This is a teenaged girl who is not tech-savvy. There is a picture of her on her public ning profile. You can't even delete these pictures once you upload them. The only way to nuke your public picture is to either upload a new picture, or, if you are sneaky like me, crop the image down to a pixel square so you get a single blank colour as your profile image. I had to send this kid detailed instructions on how to set her profile to private.

It is not my job to offer tech support for Ning's website to my users, who have had this public profile foisted onto them!

How Ning can help:

Make the deactivate button actually deactivate the account and stop trying to cling on to every last member like a spam marketing company!

Privacy FAIL: The New Ning

The vast majority of the individuals who sign up to our sites are new sign-ups with no prior experience of Ning, who have no idea that they are joining the Ning network.

About a week ago Ning launched the "new Ning". Before, my members were mine. Now, all of a sudden, they all have a public page on ning.com, displaying their photograph, a public feed of all their activity across all networks, a list of all of their friends (including those they have friended on private networks), and all of the networks they belong to.

I couldn't believe this when I first found out, so I did a little testing.

It's true. You can find people really easily. All you need is their uniqueidentifier. That's the little code you see when you hover over a link to a member's profile. The link looks something like this:

http://mynetwork.ning.com/xn/detail/u_uniqueidentifier

All you need to do if you want to spy on someone on Ning, is type this:

http://www.ning.com/u/uniqueidentifier

It took me about 30 seconds to figure this out.

I have already used the "new Ning" to spy on troublemakers, parasitical NCs who spam our site, my own moderators, individuals we have banned, real life frenemies, you name it! All you need is that uniqueidentifier and you're away! It's GREAT!!!111!!!1 (note: this is called sarcasm).

I have already found out a couple of people's real identities because when they first signed up to Ning, they used their real names. Was this Ning's intention? Or an oversight? At least facebook only shows people's profiles to people they are friends with! There is a reason for that!

I nearly came a cropper from this myself. I was registered under my real name on one of my networks. My real name was my default name in my Ning profile until I realised towards the end of last year that I simply couldn't trust Ning to keep my personal data safe and private.

I would hate for my network users to discover my real name, or even discover that network! Being an admin is a difficult job, and involves banning people and making enemies. I don't want my real name plastered all over the internet by someone with an axe to grind! I don't want people to follow me to other networks where they can cause trouble for me. I imagine there are other admins in the same situation, who aren't as internet-savvy as I am.

Many of my members are very protective of their true identities. They would be horrified if they discovered their many different network accounts had been linked together on a public page, sometimes with their real names visible.

A number of my members have been banned because they are young teenaged girls whose parents did not know they were using the internet to set up web pages about themselves, and their parents have asked me to ban them to remove their pages from my site. These individuals have also had public pages set up in their name on the new Ning.

I have already had a member leave ALL NING this week because someone has found her from another network and is, I quote, "attacking" her on all of her sites.

This is a stalker's paradise.

How Ning can help:

Set everyone's profiles to private or to be viewable by friends only by default, as they are on facebook. It's not rocket science!

WANT: Better Banned Member Management

We would like the member sign ups to include the time as well as the date that the user signed up. We would also like the banned member page to include the date and time that the user was banned. This would help us a lot in tracking down puppet accounts set up by members who have been banned for serious reasons.

On our larger site we have several hundred banned members. Most are spammer NCs, but we have no idea why some of these members have been banned, despite our best attempts to keep records. We would like the banned page to have a field where we can input the REASON why a person was banned. Even better would be a two field system, so that we can display a personalised message to the banned member, and have a second private field with additional notes.

WANT: IP Blocking

These days have to check our IP logs and our analytics software every day before we approve any members. We have been around enough for long enough now to get some unwanted cling-ons, a few trolls who like posting offensive material, and a few stalkers who have it in for some of our more influential members.

This is a complete pain in the ass to manage and takes HOURS of time. One of the most persistent troublemakers could actually be thwarted with IP blocking, because he comes from a static IP. We're tired of trying to fix this with hacks.

What I would like is a management page that allows me to enter IPs or subnets and block them server-side. I have asked Ning to block IPs server-side and I just ran into a big brick wall. It wasn't that they couldn't do it, I just think they didn't want to do it, or they didn't have an appropriate management or tracking system in place to keep a record on IP blocks.

If they left this up to individual sites, it wouldn't be a problem. The site owner could enter IPs they wanted blocking from their site, and a note next to each IP explaining why that IP was blocked.

It would also be a great help if the sign-up IP of the new member could be recorded on the pending members page (along with the TIME of sign-up instead of just the date, FFS). This IP could be deleted as soon as the member has been approved.

WANT: The Viewing of Deleted Stuff

A feature I would really like to see is to have the optional ability to view deleted profiles, comments, forum posts, and so on on the NC account, perhaps as a special "mode" you could switch on.

There have been instances in the past where trolls have posted very bad stuff, and we've had to delete their posts and ban them very quickly, without having time to take a copy of the evidence.

In one recent case we were able to track down and identify the individual concerned. If we had a big pile of evidence, we could have sent it to his workplace and got him into serious trouble. Though we still had evidence in the form of user complaints, it wouldn't have had the same impact as a print off of all the shocking pictures he had posted.

DO NOT WANT: Rebel Users

On the Ning platform, NCs have no ability to delete items from a user's profile, for example, their profile image or the content of their page. Our only option is to ban them.

Sometimes we get difficult users who post adverts on their pages or put up inappropriate profile images. NCs have very different policies about this. Some don't give a damn, others have a warning policy or a ban policy.

We would rather not ban users who post stupid stuff on our site. But how come EVERY time I send them a request to change their page, they respond with either bullshit, or downright ignore my messages?

I've had two cases in the last week. One person was advertising a rival Ning site. I requested nicely that she take it down. She ignored me. I could tell she was ignoring me, because I could see her doing other stuff on the site in her activity feed. So I left her a public comment on her wall. She used her wall, and she didn't respond to my comment. So the next day I actually threatened to ban her, and still no response!

The other individual had the f-word in her username and had a self-harm image as her profile picture. Again, I ask her to change her username and image. She responds with "I already changed it". I go and look and it's the same image. So I write her an email describing the image and ask her to change it. She responds with a less polite version of "don't have a cow", and she still doesn't change it!!!

One of these users was an adult woman who should have known better. Why do my network users think they can treat me with a complete lack of respect and get away with it?

They both got banned.

How Ning can help:

If I had the facility to delete stuff from profile pages, we could avoid this farce in the future.

WIN: New Chat

I've seen a few complaints about the new chat in the NC forum. People really don't like change. We don't use the Ning chat on our site, but I've tested the new chat on a test network.

It took me about 10 minutes to find the damn thing and I had to go look in the ning help to find out where it was. It now appears as a persistent bar across the bottom of your screen and pops up a window for you to chat inside. I think this is an improvement from having a chat tab, because the chatters just stay in there all night and don't move around the site. At least this way they might be inclined to visit the rest of the site and click on a few adverts!

Unfortunately the Ning chat still doesn't have a chat log, which is why we can't use it. I don't want to moderate a chat by clearing messages, I want a log that stores everything that has been said so I can go look up complaints when people are trolling there (usually with gross sexual suggestions). People hatch all kinds of conspiracies in chatrooms if they think the information won't be persisted.

I think most of the complaints about the new chat are based around flaky connections to the servers, which is something that will get straightened out over time.

Improvement Suggestion:

Chat logs! Chat logs! Chat logs!

White-Label FAIL: Cross Network Spam

The vast majority of my members are new sign-ups to Ning. My members are signing up to my site, not Ning. They have no idea what Ning is. I have PAID for this feature.

Unfortunately Ning has consistently failed to deliver an up-to-standard white-label experience for us. We have had numerous members spot the word "Ning" that is STILL plastered all over our site in search results, T&Cs and HTML source.

Once they have spotted "Ning", it's only a few short steps before they have set up their own network and discovered how incredibly easy it is to friend huge numbers of our members and then spam them with invites to their own network.

As of this date, we have spawned probably around twenty copycat sites, some of whom have actually stolen our taglines, stolen similar urls, stolen our rules and information pages, stolen our likenesses, stolen our look and feel, and of course stolen our members.

These NCs are absolute parasites. We've worked hard to bring in members to OUR site, and these guys come along and a few clicks later, they get members for free! They do not bring new members to Ning, they just shuffle existing members around the network and hack off good NCs like us who are actually building the Ning member base.

This cross-network spam facility has always violated the boundaries of the white-labeling system. Because it exists, we are constantly troubled with spammer NCs who arrive via the Ning directory purely to advertise their own site. NCs call these guys "member vultures". These people are relentless. They do not listen to requests to stop, they frequently lie and claim ignorance that they have done anything wrong, or apologise and claim they will change their ways, just so that we will allow them back so they can continue to friend people on the site. Our only option is to ban them as soon as we spot them, but some are so sneaky that they will join the site, make friends, then leave the site again before we can ban them. They will often join and unjoin, and set up numerous fake profiles just to friend more members to spam. Even after they have been banned, they can go ahead and spam our members as much as they like.

Some of the nastier member vultures will actually make up stories about our site or our admin just to try to get big contributors to leave our site and join theirs. We banned a group of friends last year for advertising their network, who then started spreading lies to our impressionable teenaged members that pedophiles were stalking our site. The point of this was, "you will be safe on our network!" I can't think of a more disgusting way to get members, but they are not the only people who have done this to us.

Another side-effect of these copycat networks is that they tend to accumulate troublemakers who have been banned from our network. Only last week one of my mods, who runs a small free network, was complaining to me that he always gets the people we have banned. These guys are bitter, and they get together and bitch about our site and come up with petty terrorist plots for different ways to get back at us. It's a troll's paradise.

Ning has created these people and this behavior. None of this would happen if the cross-network spam facility excluded members of white-label sites. The entire facility creates an antagonistic atmosphere between the large white-label NCs and the small amateur NCs, and an antagonistic atmosphere between the white-label NCs and Ning itself.

How Ning can help:

End the ability to send invites to friends who belong to white-label sites!

WIN: The Facebook Feed

The latest Ning release contains a feature I really like: the facebook-like feed on members' pages of all the stuff they have been up to.

Not only is this great for keeping tabs on your friends' latest discussions, photos and group activity at a glance, it's also great for me as a moderator.

This is because I can get a good overview of someone from their feed. If someone has made several hostile posts, I can see it. It's also a lot more obvious if someone has turned off their feed. Usually this means they are up to no good!

I can also use my feed to communicate to members what kind of a person I am. A lot of teens get scared of moderators, but if they can see a feed where I'm just going about my harmless daily moderatin', they can see I'm not a scary person.

I've had a total of two complaints about this feed and I've directed people to the settings page where they can turn aspects of it off. I have to say that the people who were complaining were people who had been bitching about other members behind their backs and got found out. Perhaps it will make them behave!

I even like the "weird icons" the other network creators have been complaining about.

Improvement suggestions:

A page for friends' feeds, and the ability to select which friends appear on it. Please!

About This Blog

This blog is about my experiences running several social networks on the Ning platform, including white-label networks with memberships in the tens of thousands.

Virtually all of that traffic to my networks comes from my own promotional efforts or direct from search engines.

There are many aspects of Ning I think are truly great. The platform is stable, and easy to use. The support staff are helpful. I really love the concept of Ning, and the convienience of setting up a white-label site without having to manage a load of code.

There are also aspects of Ning where I seem to find myself bashing my head against a wall.

This blog is about my personal experiences of running my sites and the silly and funny stories I can tell you.

It's also about my interactions with Ning. Sometimes I feel the need to vent. I hope that my rants will be taken as constructive criticism rather than attempts to denigrate Ning. I just want to help improve the network, and especially improve relations between Ning and their white-label network creators by giving an insight into what it is like to be a white-label NC.