Now Live: An Improved Member Management Interface

[Phil McCluskey]

Note: This change is now live. It won't affect anything your members see, but you might want to let your admins know about this change so they will know where to find all of the member-specific information whenever they need it.

I wanted to let you know about some upcoming improvements to your Ning Network's dashboard, the back-end area of your network where you and your admins do all of your moderating. We're making some user interface changes that will simplify the way you perform member management.

First, we're merging the Members > Management and Members > Moderation sections into a single interface. The Members > Moderation section has always been the place where you've approved pending members and looked up members whenever you needed to see who was suspended, who had left, or who was who. The Members > Management section has traditionally been devoted to setting up Roles like Forum Moderator, Admin, or custom roles for your specific needs. Pulling this all into one interface will allow you to do more moderation in one place -- and with less clicks.

What's different?

Previously, you had separate tabs for Members, Admins, Pending, Invited, etc. These have all been replaced with a drop-down filter that allows you to take contextual actions. This should save you some time and allow you to filter content more easily. You'll be able to choose multiple members and simply apply an action to those members. You'll also now see a prominent way to administer Roles, which we've renamed "Administrative Roles" while giving it a full tab position.

We've made a few other minor changes that should improve the experience of working in this area. When viewing your list of Suspended members for example, it makes more sense to have that list be sorted by the date they were suspended — and not the day they joined your network. And in the Invited list we've added a new column so that you can see what kind of invitation (Network, Group or Event) someone has received.

To what end? 

This is the initial phase of a larger project: Member Categories. Member Categories will let you create different member types and assign your members to them. We think it's going to be a great feature for every network, and we'll provide more details on it in the days ahead.

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi macfly,

1) We've had another report of this and we're investigating, thanks.

2) We couldn't sort on the Left and Suspended dates because of the way that data is structured, so we sorted on the last update date of the profile object instead. That should approximate the Left and Suspended dates in most cases, but it seems like we're publishing that last updated date rather than the actual Left and Suspended dates, which makes it more obviously wrong. We'll see if we can update that this week.

Thanks,
Phil 

[the_real_macfly]

Thanks for the update, Phill!  Regarding 2), I followed that trail because of the number of members apparently suspended on 12/24.  Glad that you are looking into this.

[Starrfire Price]

Looks great! BUT :) I did notice that with the update the selection to delete pending members is no longer an option. It shows the option on current members but not pending. Is that a glitch or is that the new format?

Many thanks for all your work!

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Starrfire,

Declining membership to someone who is pending is the same as deleting them.

[Starrfire Price]

But decline sends them a decline message where the delete feature just deleted them without notification.

[Eric Suesz]

No. I don't think you receive a message when you are declined. 

[Starrfire Price]

You're right, at one time it would send them a decline message but I just noticed the pop up upon declining a member that says it deletes them without notification. Many thanks for all the work you all do! Great Job, as usual :)

[FedMedic]

[soaringeagle]

yayyy but can you go into more details on the upcoming members catagories? whats that mean can uit be like  trialk full  and sponsored interfacing with the payway=]ll to allow more priveledges or is it more honorary like

members and super members which are the most helpful and active

just wondering where the member catagories visions leading

[Donald Halley]

Can not do any batch kick out.... were the ek is gone that fonction. I had to clear the spammers from there own page one by one

Is it to hard for ning to do things beta till it work fine ?
Fix it or kill it

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Donald, we haven't removed any functionality with these changes.

[Roger+Pamela Foulks]

Thank you very much for improving these things.  We are very tired of having to suspend new members from our Florida Network.  They enroll using fictitious made-up names obviously for promoting, as well as spamming our Network Members.