Increase the Minimum Required Age of Your Members + All Ning Mentions in Terms of Service Now Removed

[Eric Suesz]

Hello, again, Network Creators. Seasons greetings!

We made a few changes today that I think most of you will be happy to hear about. You now have more choices about who can sign up for your network — specifically around the age of new members.

FIrst, you now have the choice to increase the minimum required age of your members. Is your network only meant for Baby Boomers who are over 60? You can now change the minimum age to reflect this. And your Terms of Service will be automatically changed to reflect your new age requirement.

Second, you can now do away altogether with asking for birth dates during sign up. Your new members will still be required to accept your Terms of Service (with a minimum age of 13), even if you turn off the birth date check.

You'll find these new options in the Members > Controls section of your management dashboard.

We also updated your network’s default Terms of Service to add our standard DMCA notice guidelines and to remove the last few mentions of “Ning.” There is no longer any mention of Ning in your default network Terms of Service.

I know that most of these have been requested in the past a number of times, so we’re happy to be giving you these new options.

Hope your holidays are looking bright!

[Chris]

Ken - that makes perfect sense now! It leads me to believe the fix for the most recent DOB sign up issues is to actively select a minimum age. My guess is the default minimum hasn't been set correctly. That would seem to clear the "facebook birthday bug", "invalid birthday warning bug", and "ineligible to register bug".

If you're having these sign-up issues since last thursday (when this release started to roll out) then try actively choosing a minimum age, let us know if it fixes it. That's probably what fixed it for me!

 

[Patrick Mee]

Ken,

 

We just deployed a fix to production.

For some reason, yet to be discovered, some networks had corruption in their data, that was causing this issue. Unfortunately your network was one of those networks.

We have put code in place that can work around this corruption if it encounters it. We will have to investigate why this data was getting corrupted, but we do have some thoughts.

Sorry for the inconvience,

Patrick

[Chris]

Nice one Patrick, thanks for letting us know!

[Eric Suesz]

Thank you, Patrick. Huge help!

[Toni]

Thanks Patrick!

We perfectly understand that unexpected bugs can happen, even with small updates...

 

So, to avoid these bad experiences and NCs heart attacks ( :D ), can we expect to get an e-mail (from now on) before you guys change something on our networks?

I think that all of us would probably be happy to know what's going on (and check if it creates no such bug), even if we have to wait for 1 more day (at least) to see the new great things you're doing guys!!!

[Eric Suesz]

Great points, Toni.

Communication has something we've been very, very focused on in the past year, and I think it has gotten better overall. We currently have a number of communication channels, which we use in different ways for different types of releases. I'm a big fan of email, although it admittedly won't reach everyone (although I am always quite happy with how many people respond to our emails by clicking through). In-product messaging that is in-your-face-but-dismissible can be tiring to some, although it is pretty effective. We haven't gotten it right in every situation, but we aim to. I think we didn't get it right this time, even with the two-month beta. I personally think we've gotten better with our product digests, which are summaries of what's just been released, but I think we can do better still with putting upcoming info on your dashboard, for example. And, in this type of situation, that kind of notice would have been very helpful.

I honestly appreciate your feedback a lot and will pass it along for sure. Thanks for saying it nicely, too.

[Ken Mawbey]

Hi Eric

I agree with the suggestion of messages to creators advising of such changes. Our network has lost 3 days of new members joining as well as some negative comments on Twitter from people understandably fustrated not being able to join.

Even now, I'm not sure of the statas of the fix or workarounds for this problem.

We need direct advance notification of network affecting changes and when things go wrong, we need to be advised of the problem, impact, workarounds, confirmation of fix.

To find out these issues and workarounds via searching these forums is not great.

Thanks, Ken

[Chris]

Thanks Eric, well put.

[Ken Mawbey]

Hi Patrick

Thanks for the fix, however can you confirm that this has resolved all the issues. I thought by selecting 13 would solve the DOB signup issues, however it just changed the terms of service. Still no-one could sign up. I had to turn off DOB request as a temp workaround.

Thanks, Ken

[Eric Suesz]

Hey, Ken. I believe this should be fixed, but if you are still having trouble that you think might be related, please let us know.

[Ken Mawbey]

Hi Eric - That's great, thanks for the confirmation

[Evan]

Hey Marshall!

Thanks for pointing this out. Looks like we missed updating this version of the TOS. I'll try to get this done shortly.

/Evan