Current status of the Ning Platform is always available on the Ning Status Blog.

Ning 2Q 2017 plan!

Most of you have asked us about Product plan for the nearest future. And here it is! 

For the last couple of months we’ve been listening to you very carefully, gathering and analyzing all your feedbacks to make Ning platform a better place for you and your members.

So here is the list of functions we are going to release in Q2.

1) Making Ning 3.0 as functional as Ning 2.0:
- Paid Access. Probably the most expected feature that will be much better and way more functional than the previous version.
- Chats. Basically, they are live now, but in Q2 this option will be upgraded to the next level.
- Audio. The basic feature with basic performance.

2) Completely new features:
- Polls. You will be able to ask different questions, receive immediate feedback from your customers and make research you need in order to evolve your platform.
- Member ranking system. To encourage, motivate and engage your members, as well as develop your community.

3) Some upgrades are coming for both platforms:
- Disk usage is going to be visible for all creators to manage your space and resources.
- Broadcast messages will become more functional, with a bunch of new settings for you and your members.

4) Our brand new redesigns are also coming to push Ning to a new era not only functionally, but visually as well:
- Ning.com redesign is live now and you can check it out on https://www.ning.com/
- Creators.ning.com and Ning corporate blog will try out new outfits this quarter too.

5) New migration script. Those who would like to migrate from Ning 2.0 to Ning 3.0 to use more benefits would be able to do that easily.

6) System monitoring. 99,9% of uptime monitoring is now done, which gives us the opportunity to keep everything under control, and provide you with better and better service.

7) Hardware renovation plan, that our tech team is currently working on, is going to be ready by the end of Q2.

If you have any ideas on how to improve our service and you are willing to share your thoughts don't hesitate to email us at support@ning.com
Don’t miss it all, follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Ning/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/Ning) to keep yourself fully informed about all upcoming updates!

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  • I am really happy that Ning is moving forward again. I hope that some of the improvement will focus on the support experience.

    Our site has not been useable for a month. Images that have been fine for two years are now all distorted. The Ning support team has closed the ticket twice without making any fixes or acknowledging that they understand the problem.

    After filing tickets, sending examples and finding where the css is distorting the images, I still am getting generic stall tactics. It would make so much difference if there was a sense that anyone cared. Instead, this has been the most frustrating customer service I have ever experienced. 

    This is not the best venue to vent about support, but I have tried all other avenues.

    I would love to see Ning succeed, but if this is the best you can do, I worry for your future. 

    • This all sounds too familiar!  All we're asking for is a little transparency, or even better, advanced warning.

    • Hi, Tim!

      We do apologise for the misunderstanding, unfortunately, our ticket system could have closed the ticket automatically if there was no communication in it for the certain period of time. However, don't worry we are using another bug tracking system in order to track the issue and the issue you have reported is still opened there. Moreover, the issue with squashed photos has been included into the current sprint and according to the prediction of the developers, it should be fixed till the 10-th of May 2017 if everything would go fine.

      Best regards,

      Ning Team.

      • This is a nice effort Ning Team, some quick thoughts you might find useful:

        The customer service experience here has gone through various evolutions over the years, but what we are experiencing right now with the backlog of issues, the complaints about automated support systems, and the need to address known issues with better communication  - none of this is new.

        If I recall, the best solutions in the past had to do with a combination of proactive system monitoring on your side with regular, real-time, and even email notification sign-ups off the Ning Status Blog. That system never truly matured to its full potential, and during that interim we still had to come here as NC's to express what problems we were having - to collaboratively recognize system issues beyond mere glitches or slight coding errors from changes we made on our side, but especially to make sure the info was getting through to a real, intelligent, and empowered representative on your side.

        Furthermore along these lines, frequently asked questions along with structured curriculum for new users etc, these were all being built into a coherently organized menu and search feature via pages I would imagine, but right here on Ning Creators. My understanding is you are training someone right now who may look at standing back up these kind of things.

        Transparency is a real big deal and you would not be able to understand this until you have been a customer vested in some Ning project only to be disappointed by the service. We should be the first to know of issues from you in most cases, but it is still OK if we can bring things up and see they are being addressed. Still, a diminishing return on communicating these on a case by case basis, sometimes better to use a message board or mass notification... we also used to have a monthly newsletter sent out to us offering a summary view of issues noted, dispositions, etc. Of course, we also had the product roadmap.

        In all such cases, the key is open communication and transparency. The problem we came across with that was limitations in staffing... you already point to this limitation in some of your answers but it is real - cannot do everything for everyone all the time, cannot make everyone happy, and limitations on resources causes you to make tough decisions. It's that kind of logic that ends up making things worse from the perspective of the customers though... a decision to outsource some third party support automation tool, for instance, and now you get an infuriating scripted response... and your effort to communicate with the platform vendor goes nowhere - as if it were intentional like some insurance company that doesn't want to make filing a claim easy, wants to shoot down your claim as invalid, and most certainly doesn't want to pay. It's terrible.

        To be transparent is to expose yourself for what you truly are and how things are really going behind the scenes. It means not depending on that perfectly polished first impression you want to put out there for new users - as if you all knew exactly what you were doing and were totally in control - but to say, yeah we are people, we care about what you are saying, and we are genuinely trying to meet you in the middle. It exposes you to the scrutiny of the web, web businesses, and competing strategic interests - as if you did not want to give away your proprietary secrets, but most of your customers don't care bout that at all - we know a more competitive company is going to be focused on the people and their experience anyway.

        Best, Anthony

        • "Transparency is a real big deal and you would not be able to understand this until you have been a customer vested in some Ning project only to be disappointed by the service... In all such cases, the key is open communication and transparency... To be transparent is to expose yourself for what you truly are and how things are really going behind the scenes."

          Anthony, I think non-familiarity with both the value of customer communication and ning's background history is not an issue, considering that the current owner of ning was CIO (Chief Information Officer) at ModeMedia for the 3 years prior to Mode's demise and their sale of ning in Sept 2016.   

          • George, that is a strong point, thank you. I have thoughts on this I will expand on below and not necessarily directed at you, but the way you put it is worth consideration and I will be thinking about it. In these social arenas / customer communities, it sometimes boils down to "agree to disagree" as if everyone's opinion is equally relevant (or irrelevant). I personally stand to "disagree to disagree" as if there's a right answer.

            I guess we could say they ought to have the benefit of knowing their own history of problems / attempted solutions and a pretty developed perspective on customer communications - perhaps even evident in their current work to stand the platform up and engage the customer community here.

            We might also say it is possible the current ownership could be little more than a holding company with the same stakeholders - Andreessen famously was among first to try to monetize the web via advertising, failing with the whole Netscape / AOL thing, but he just reconstituted through his other investments like Ning... when that didn't work out. was then on the board for Mode Media, and in that sense Arora might have just been repackaging the product for sale under a new brand / management premise - a masquerade... when that failed, whoever still had money invested might have looked to cut losses and salvage, perhaps via Noosphere as a transitional portfolio management, and thus it would only make sense to plug in the old CIO under Mode.

            I've approached the new ownership and they've been responsive but not very forthcoming. It might be too early to really rip into them because they are showing signs of progress for the first time in years, although drastically behind the curve. When I first looked into them and what they did with some of their portfolio assets, I saw nothing to make me believe they would be anything but worse for Ning... they've actually done some cleaning up of their portfolio since then so it doesn't look so bad, but tracking the money found my way to some holding fund being routed through the Netherlands or such, and for all we know might just as well still be one of Andreessen's babies.

            In any case, perspective matters. Despite popular adoration of the old regimes, or the near instant buy-in NC's offered in support of Mode Media, these problems of perspective have always shown through. The company has never really truly ever lived up to it's promises - said a lot of stuff we wanted to hear and that validated our passion for projects using them as our platform provider of choice - just time and again have screwed over customers because were never really looking at it from the perspective of our journey and how they could serve us. It's been more of just a gold rush to cash in on the next digital bubble - websites/advertising (no good) > try social websites/advertising (no good) > try social media/advertising (no good)> try ipo/exit (no good)> try whatever they are trying now (to what good unknown).

            • Communications | It all sounds like pretty much the same lines - we hear you, but the customer viewpoint matters only insomuch as it relates to feature development, and then only so much as it relates to new user sales. To suggest that the customer is always right would be a direct contradiction to the principles of scale and automation.

            • Transparency | You get only what you need to know - which is really not much. It's not necessarily honest either, but more of a PR communication telling us things we want to hear, but not necessarily convincing us they are genuinely "in it with us" more like - "We are working on it for you". Eric, the old customer advocate and liaison for Ning did quite a lot to stand up the customer experience - particularly establishing the product roadmap - but later expressed how difficult it was to get the leadership to support that... primarily because of the aggressive poaching of talent and strategic plans across the industry... but notably because end-users were not the customers that management was really aiming for. To suggest transparency should be key to their strategy would be implying that we end-users matter and are significant, that our projects are critical like start-ups in a portfolio, and that being in the loop allows us to invest our resources more intelligently and securely over a planning horizon... that "we" end-users are their intended customer.

            Never been here to troll. I've got a Ning project and all I've wanted was to advocate my interests as reasonable consideration... to see a real two way feedback loop where instead of business to consumer we are treated as partners... pretty much what they sold me on a decade ago, and sure enough right there in their current messaging.

            Well, my project does not fly because the product doesn't work, AND it has come close but never actually worked, AND whenever I had something minimally viable the company has come in and disrupted what I built, AND my platform provider has just increasingly sucked over time as a partner in my project's success, AND I realize all I've been paying for here is to hold onto my idea indefinitely until such a time as this company wakes up, SO that's why I come on here from time to time in the hopes of possibly altering their perspectives and direction. I CAN BE SATISFIED! I only ask for what has already been promised, and features are part of that but not all of it. Should NIng live up to its potential, my project would (still even 10 years later) kick ass, AND so too would this platform as service provider to your projects rock, AND so too would that mean a killer investment in Ning. LET'S DO THIS!

      • Thank you for the answer. My only regret is that it took just short of a month to get an empathetic, coherent answer. One of the reasons I posted here is so Ning has some feedback for the customer service process. Better communication would make a world of difference.

        After I posted this, we finally figured out how to insert our own css to override the width constraints, so the site is now at least useable for it's purpose. The images still come in wrong, but then snap to the appropriate proportion.

        We look forward to the fix when it comes. And if it comes, we will remain loyal customers.

  • Hi,

    In Q2 will there be the opportunity to choose between old themes similar to Ning 2 or similar?

    • Hi, Tony!

      As I know the new themes are not in the plan in Q2, but I'll post the suggestion to create several new themes.

      And I'm just wondering why do you wish to have exact the same or similar to Ning 2.0 themes as they are pretty old?

      Best regards,

      Ning Team.

      • Hi Kyryl,

        Just to add to this. Great when you offer more themes! Just to make sure: if new themes become available, will Ning give its current customers the option to use them, as well as an option not to use them? That's because I want to remain in control of the themes I use. So might the new themes not 100% fit with my platforms goals, or esthetic preferences of my networks, I want to be able to not use new themes.

        Regards,

        Douwe

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