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]

Thanks Paul

[Paul Harrison]

Another point:

It would be good if we could assign the ability to CREATE discussions, blogs and groups and the ability to UPLOAD photos music and videos to categories of members, depending on whether and how much they paid.
This is in addition to the ability to view certain places.

To recap: I am suggesting that creators should have the ability to allow access to members who had already paid a subscription to our organization.

The above requirements would I think be common among existing organizations/companies who already have subscription schemes outside of Ning and would like to give their subscribers extra privileges on Ning that are not available to non-subscribers.

[TJ Gilsenan]

This is great! My site is based around individual (free) and company (paid) memberships.  My goal is to offer multiple levels of paid memberships, each with increasing levels of functionality.  Thanks

[Paul Harrison]

Do you think that what is described by Phil McCluskey above will allow you to do this? So far I can't see that, but I would love to be wrong.

[TJ Gilsenan]

Seems to me at the moment it is mostly about organization rather than permissions. Or more specifically, paid permissions.  It sounds like that is the direction we are heading, so it may just be a matter of time.

I plan to charge corp members offline and approve their mem once they have paid.  Inelegant I know, but it will have to do for now...

[Bret Teegarden]

This is a bit off topic but relevant to managing members. I received this message via Facebook from a concerned member:

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Hi - I have been trying to get in touch with you, to let you know that since you began charging for membership on NMP, the emails that you send will not let anyone unsubscribe. Upon clicking unsubscribe, it requires you pay for a membership. 

I just wanted to let you know, because this is violation of the CAN-SPAM act and you may want to get that resolved ASAP.

I'm just trying to look out so you don't get fined. 

All my best!

Andrew

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When I began using Paid Access, I comped the membership of every member for to months. Since I have not deleted all those members, they continue to get all my broadcast messages which include an unsubscribe link but they can not unsubscribe from email without paying for a membership.

I have repeatedly notified members that if they wanted to be removed to let me know and I would be glad to do so, but it seems this is not enough and according to the CAN-SPAM Act, we are in violation by requiring paid access for old members to unsubscribe from email messages.

Thanks for your attention and please forgive if this is not an appropriate place to bring this up.

BretTeegarden

NashvilleMusicPros.com

If what this gentleman is telling me is true, this puts VERY MANY network creators in a precarious position to say the least!

What if anything can be done to remedy this situation? 

[Eric Suesz]

Hey, Bret. This reply seems like it might be a little off-topic. Can you maybe repost this as a new discussion? Or, even better: Can you shoot us a message from your Support link so we can have someone investigate and offer you a guaranteed response? We're not able to respond to all inquiries here on Creators, but we can stay on target and investigate if you can work through our regular ticketing process. If something's wrong, we'll try to get it fixed. Thanks. 

[Bret Teegarden]

Sure will, thanks

[Riccardo Rossini]

Well done!!!

[the_real_macfly]

Just noticed:  the new member management interface reports "Administrative Roles (0)".  Which is certainly incorrect.

[Nidia]

Hi there,

Is it possible to a membre change the translation on my ning?

Because I had change the translation on Management Members "left" to the correct word and it apear an incorrect translation... and I search and now I cannot find it to put the correct translation.

[soaringeagle]

instead of eaching use the filters to see all changed or miss9ng text

no a member cant change it however an admin might be able to and  sometimes when you change something it takes a lil while till u see the change