Thank you for your patience over the past several weeks. As you know, we closely follow and appreciate the feedback you share on Creators, and we’d like to make a couple of important announcements related to your posts.
First, regarding the product, the team has been working over the last several months on re-architecting and re-developing a new Activity Feed for Ning 3.0. The new Activity Feed will include the addition of statuses and more embeds based on pasting links into the status field. This isn’t everything that the team is working on but the most significant short term new capability. We are planning to release this feature in July.
We also wanted to address the downtime that some of you experienced on May 26th and 27th. After the scheduled maintenance on Monday to update a group of servers, we discovered that some of the backup servers were malfunctioning. We've corrected this and have changed our operating procedures to prevent this from happening again.
On the communication side, based on several factors including resources and priorities, we have made the decision that we will no longer be involved in providing day-to-day support and feedback through the Creators community. Communication from the Ning team needs to be focused on product capabilities and new releases and other general announcements such as this one. Our team is focusing on expanding some of the planned features that we already have in development. Once we have more information to share with you, we will do it here.
Please continue to use this community as a productive place to have conversations about how to build, grow, and manage Ning Networks. We will continue to provide technical support through tickets and phone. As always, phone support is available to those with networks on Pro, Performance and Ultimate plans. Our technical support team is available Monday to Friday from 9 am to 5 pm PST.
Replies
Even with the new prices, Ning is a good deal for a platform that is genuinely original and easy to use.
It's wild world out there for social networking technology, with hardware and software constantly changing. Given the storms all around us, I would rate Ning as stable enough. We all should have Plan Bs in mind of course, even the best of times.
One thing I would like to see is a Ning Foundation being established (even on a small scale) to focus on making the platform accessible to people in lower income countries.
Perhaps there could be some kind of discussion with Kiva.org to support small businesses that want to use a Ning platform to, say, develop a customer-service network for a family-operated laundry in Cairo, Manila, Haiti, or Lagos. If Kiva could point people in the direction of NIng, then Ning might be able to offer discount prices. And the people who support Kiva with donations could decide whether using a social network looks like a good a plan for this or that small business.
Ning is about community, Richard, and, then, have a community where there is interaction between customers and staff is something essential. Besides, what are these costs? There is only one employee responsible for this community and the others posts here as an activity that is already within their normal work. I have to remember that many times, at no cost, this community gave the feedback for various improvements in the platform and localized problems.
Anyway, if Ning wants to change that, it is an option that he can do. But leave us in the dark for nearly two weeks was not something unproductive.
Hi Thiago,
It's easy to see things externally. Ultimately there's someone at Ning responsible for making tough decisions.
Some of these decisions are going to upset people, which is unfortunate.
I can't speak about being in the dark for two weeks, I have no insight into what happened there.
As far as I'm aware, Ning isn't shutting the creators community down. They're just not going to have a person dedicated to it anymore. I suspect that they're using this money instead on platform development.
Thank you for your reply Richard. As you can see I do not participate in Ning bashing, although i do follow the concerns of other NCs on the platform. My approach is to usually find something productive to post like a tip, trick or workaround which helps other network creators from having to pay a developer to solve simple problems. I do see very clearly what the situation is and being with Ning since 2007 I knew the days when Ning wasn't so everpresent on this forum. In fact, i am hoping that we go back to the days when NCs work together to solve problems and rely less on Ning corporate for answers. Over the past year, this community has become less about building communities and more about what people are getting for thier money or rather what Ning customers feel they should be getting from Ning. What i didn't understand was the reasoning behind allowing the platform to go rogue for almost a week which runs counterproductive to what they were trying to do. It all seems to be working itself out so I am happy for that. Now we can get back to doing what we all came here to do. I was just interested in your take on the situation and now that we have it, we can all truly put this into perspective and get back to community building. Thanks for piping in.
JFarrow, I remember the days when ning had less of a present and we relied on other creators or "developers." But remember that was when we had access to our source code and could make changes on our networks as we pleased. Instead, ning took that away from creators and charged more money for less control. If we still had that control maybe we would have important functions that each of us need for our networks, for example, instant notifications and categories for videos and blogs.
+1
Thank you for your reply good to hear from someone. Although being singled out from the many concerned voices on here is interesting, but still I am glad to hear from you.
We don't disagree that Ning works hard but we customers and many of us who have either worked for large corporations or have spouses that have worked for large corporations know business as you do and this forum is set up for us therefore coming off of John Bizleys discussion being deleted then this broadcast suddenly popped up well it cast a shadow over us.
Not having any knowledge of timelines when we have been waiting for a LONG time leaves your customers wondering what the heck? Either the organisation is not seeing us properly or they are not hearing us. Unfortunately I see on many forums on Creators questions and questions and questions with voices of concern for their hard work and to discount that is troubling.
Even Mom and Pop small companies with no money have customer service plus with the marriage of Glam/Mode who is focusing on Videos makes one scratch their heads. Great news! But what about us?
Hi Skye,
It's important to note that I'm not a Ning employee here. I don't speak for or represent them. All of what I say is my opinion. I don't know the entire background of product roadmaps or John Bizleys situation.
Ning does offer customer service. They have dedicated customer support lines.
The challenge is where to prioritise spending. If you are running Ning, would you charge more? Spend money on the community? Or spend money on further developing the product?
I like this discussion and am glad they incorporated your help here. I don't have the answers either but they did do a questionnaire for our input and we certainly haven't heard what happened to it and where we are going with it. That would be a great start, but if Ning is having money issues then we as customers need to know this so we can better understand why our communities are not fully functional a year and half later.
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