Now Live: An Improved Member Management Interface

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.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Eric Suesz on January 30, 2012 at 2:30pm

I think you may still need some place where you can edit those roles. Also, keep in mind that categories will be coming to this location as well. So, the number of tabs will increase.

Permalink Reply by Writer Chick {Diane} on January 30, 2012 at 2:37pm

OH HELL YEAH!!!!

I was panicking because my Moderation section was gone, but decided I should check out the forum first before I posted a discussion about it. Woohoo!

I am soooooooooooooooooo glad to finally see the members listed in a LOGICAL order! Suspended members by the date they were ousted. "Left" members by the date they left. So much easier that way!!

I'm loving it!! Thanks Ning!

Permalink Reply by Samuel Tattersfield on January 30, 2012 at 3:12pm

This is very good news and great timing....are we talking this month for the new member categories option?

Permalink Reply by Patrick Chappelle on January 30, 2012 at 3:27pm

As Eric has said in a previous response, there is no definite date when this will happen, Samuel. Considering that tomorrow is quite literally the end of the month, it is doubtful it will happen then.

Permalink Reply by Samuel Tattersfield on January 30, 2012 at 3:35pm

Damn it....I've lost track of what month it is already ;-)....just got a little excited about the new development.

Permalink Reply by Patrick Chappelle on January 31, 2012 at 10:56am

LOL @ Samuel!

Permalink Reply by Jayne on January 30, 2012 at 4:03pm

Looks good to me.

Just looking through it now, and notice that people that were suspended months ago, even up to a year, it is saying they were suspended Jan 27, 2012, not too much of a problem for me, but other networks might not like that happening.

Permalink Reply by Phil McCluskey on January 30, 2012 at 4:20pm

Thanks Jayne, we'll take a look.

Permalink Reply by Jayne on January 30, 2012 at 4:22pm

Thanks Phil.

Permalink Reply by Santa Norm on January 30, 2012 at 4:06pm

Great, we still need an associate membership and now we need an honorary membership (those who don't have PC access.

Permalink Reply by Janettee McCrary on January 30, 2012 at 5:12pm

Thanks for posting this - I was a little freaked out when I couldn't see my member "moderation" section via the manage tab anymore!

Permalink Reply by the_real_macfly on January 30, 2012 at 5:50pm

All nice and well thought through, but numbers and dates are a bit off kilter at the moment:

The tab next to "Members" says "Administrative Roles (0)". Now, thats clearly incorrect in my case.
According to the deleted members list, I seem to habe thrown out many trolls etc. on 24. December 2011. Thats kind of cute; trolls should get a christmas present, too. (Namely, being booted.) But it is still wrong. Are some of your programmers using 12/24/2011 as a special handle to catch bugs? I would have thought that 02/29/2038 is more eye-catching.