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!