Inviting Friends to Groups - STILL Very Difficult!

[kopper]

Does anyone else get really frustrated when trying to invite current network members to join groups? Or am I the only one who seems to have problems with this?

I'm talking about going to a specific group, then clicking the "invite" button, and then trying to invite someone from your friends list ("Invite Friends") currently on the network. When I do this, it brings up a LONG list of my friends. Since I'm the main guy behind my network, I have a LOT of friends (over 3,300 at last check). So it ain't easy to find a specific person in my friends list to invite to a group. I will try scrolling down the list, but often have to wait for the little spinning gear icon (I don't even know what it's called) to stop and bring up more friends. It looks like this:

I will often have to see that thing pop up and spin several times while I'm trying to scroll through my list of friends. It can take several minutes to bring everyone up, and then often there will be some missing, and others will be completely out of order. I complained recently to Ning's customer support about the fact that the alphabetical listing of friends is messed up, too, and Monica responded by telling me:

I agree that this could be improved upon, and I've gone ahead and filed a request for this with the product team for consideration down the road.

It's this sort of response that drives me up a wall. This is a BUG that needs to be fixed, and it's been a problem for YEARS. It needs to be addressed NOW, not "down the road." It's like they're telling us, yeah, that's a problem, so let's just put it on the backburner for now and get to it later (which means never). That's TERRIBLE customer support, esp. for a Pro network account. I deal with this problem and the spinning gear thing DAILY.

This has been a "bug" for as long as I've been managing my Ning network, and I think it's time Ning really fixes it. Is that so wrong?

Furthermore, the entire "Invite Friends" section should be improved upon so that we can easily find (search) for a specific member... not have to scroll through the entire list. This function is really lagging behind. I posted about this same issue over a year ago and someone mentioned that this "Invite Friends" function never even entered beta... that it was (and remains) in alpha status! In fact, it hasn't been improved upon in over four years of using it. Unbelievable.

[kopper]

Nah, the first thing I do (even before trying to load all of the friends on my list) is to UNcheck "all friends." It still doesn't help.

By the way, as I mentioned above, since posting this, it's gotten much worse... to the point where I've pretty much given up trying to invite specific people to one group or another. It can take me several minutes and then their name doesn't even come up in the list (even though they're one of my friends on the network). Friggin' awful.

[Charlie]

Any news on when this is going to be addressed and improved????

As Kopper has said, for any of us who are admins (and therefore have a lot of people on our friends lists), this is a complete nightmare! We try to help out new members, by getting them involved and sending them an invite to one or two groups they might like, but it's such a horrible experience that I've given up even trying now. Which for a social network, is a really bad position to be in.

[kopper]

I've had to begun unfriending people in hopes that it improves (so that my friends list is shorter and therefore takes less time to load). That, too, is a laborious process and something that I shouldn't have to do just because their invite feature is so clunky and dysfunctional.

Ning seems to not care about improving deep-rooted functionality on the site that's been an issue since Day One, aside from the shiny bells & whistles like upgrading the friggin' chat room or whatever.

[Speed Racer]

Kopper,

 did you try my suggestion I posted earlier? Let us know if that works or not.

[kopper]

Oh yeah, sorry. That doesn't work. Remember, as you're scrolling down through your friends, not all of them show up, anyway, and you have to continually stop scrolling for the gear wheel to spin and refresh with some new names. But, of course, it's not all of them, because as soon as you start scrolling down a bit more, you have to wait again for it to refresh. This has to happen dozens of times for it to display all my friends, and even then I've had it happen where people just don't show up in the list.

[Speed Racer]

An option to pop your friends list into a new tab/window would make this idea work...would be a great addition to the platform in my opinion.

[kopper]

Here's another example of just how messed up this is. When I'm scrolling through my list of friends when trying to invite folks to a group, I'll often find multiple friends listed twice:

Now, I haven't selected anyone yet. But I can... I can select ONE of the two boxes for the same friend:

And it tells me there at the bottom that I have "1 friend selected." OK, great. But if I also select the OTHER box for Jason Ross, look what happens:

It now says I have "2 friends selected," when I actually have only selected the same friend TWICE! So how does this compute? Will Jason Ross (who, by the way, just recently joined my network and only has ONE profile under that name, not two) receive two invitations for the same group, or will he receive one? Or will he receive any at all? I really have no way of knowing because this is so freakin' MESSED UP.

[kopper]

This is fun, too. The alphabetizing is also all screwed up:

See how the lowercase a's follow the uppercase G's above? Well, if I scroll a bit down (below) you'll see that the uppercase F's follow the lowercase d's... shouldn't the uppercase F's appear BEFORE the uppercase G's? I'm pretty sure I know my ABC's... but does Ning?

Why are these all outta whack? Because this is the most dysfunctional feature of the site! It's beyond broken. Please fix it!!

[kopper]

Continuing to scroll down my friends list, I spotted Gareth, Garfield & Gary again... in a completely different part of the list:

Look at the next screen shot... what's Z-Man doing stuck in there between Wolfsludge and Holy Twist? And furthermore, why do we have H's following W's and a Z? What the hell is going on with this? It has a mind of its own!

[kopper]

I've noticed lately that this function was working much better than in the past. I wasn't having the same issues where the alphabetical listing of my friends was all mixed up, and I wasn't having a problem finding any particular friends in the list as long as I scrolled down far enough to pull them up in the "Invite Friends" window. HOWEVER, this morning I was trying to invite a friend of mine named "RJ" to a particular group, but the "Invite Friends" window was only displaying those friends whose names begin with the letter "A" (and one whose name starts with a special character). See the attached screen shot below... I have the scroll bar all the way down, yet all you can see are names beginning with "A." I contacted support about this, but wanted to post about it here in case any of you were experiencing similar problems with this feature. 

[kopper]

Another thing I just noticed... If I click "Friends on this Network" so that all friends are checked, it still tells me that "0 friends selected." See:

[kopper]

Apparently this is only happening to me in Google Chrome. Just tried it in Safari and it worked fine again. So please have someone investigate why all the names aren't coming up in this window when using the Google Chrome browser.

Thanks!