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.

[Bret Teegarden]

Am I the only person who would like to see some kind of management for "paid access" members? I really need to be able to sort by paid and non-paid members as well as sorting by renewal dates.

[Jen]

Really anxious to hear more about Member Categories!

=)

[Phil McCluskey]

You will! We're still working on it.

[Bret Teegarden]

I hope that was in reply to my question Phil, if so, that would be SO helpful!

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Bret,

No, it was in response to Jen's comment. Unfortunately we're not going to be making any changes to Paid Access subscriber management with this release. Until we can get to that, your best bet as a workaround is to export your subscriber list and sort by various columns in a spreadsheet program.

Thanks,
Phil 

[Bret Teegarden]

Yes, doing that now, but what a pain for managing members. We need to purge inactive members who don't plan on participating in paid access. If it were a few hundred, no big deal, but with close to 5000, well, I'm sure you can imagine.

[Phil McCluskey]

Can I ask what kind of paywall setup you have? Is your main problem that you need to separate subscribers from non-subscribers so that you can delete the non-subscribers?

[Bret Teegarden]

It is a complete network paywall, and when viewing member management, it does not tell me is the member is a paid member or not. Also, in the Paywall management tabs of Member Comp and Subscribers, I have no way to sort that list and must do a search by the exact member name to find them. 

My goal is to delete non-subscribers based on their last log-in date, starting with those who have not logged in recently.

Also, I originally comped all members for two months after we turned paid access on.

[Phil McCluskey]

Got it. That's very helpful, thanks Bret.

[Bret Teegarden]

Thank you for responding! Much appreciated. I would be even more appreciative if some simple sorting features make it into paid access management at some point.

[Gail]

Is this live for everyone now because my interface does not look like this yet.

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Gail,

Yes, this portion went live a few days ago. I checked your network and it's running the latest code. Just head to your network Dashboard and click on the Members icon or else on the Management link in the dashboard menu under Members.