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!
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