Ning Plus & Ning Pro: Relaxing Limits, Strengthening Email Reliability

[Eric Suesz]

One of our superstar product managers, Nick, just posted this on the Ning Blog. I thought it would be of interest to Creators, so I am simply reposting it here. —E

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For the launch of Ning Mini, Ning Plus, and Ning Pro coming up on July 20, we’ve been revisiting every limit that’s currently in place on your Ning Network today. And for each of these limits, we’ve been asking: Does it make sense?

We've shared many updates on our FAQ page in the past two months, but I wanted to dive in a little deeper here and explain why we’ll be removing limits that don't make sense anymore and introducing a few additional limits that will ultimately improve the member experience.

As Diego mentioned in the recent Product Roadmap blog post, we're focusing on Network Creators’ control with our upcoming features. To that point, we're going to remove and relax a number of limits on the Ning Plus and Ning Pro plans. Here are the highlights of what we’ve already changed:

• Place up to 50 tabs in your Ning Network’s navigation (up from 14)
• Include up to 25 Text Boxes, 25 RSS feeds, and 50 total features on your Main Page
• Include up to 100,000 characters of CSS in your Advanced Appearance (up from 15,000)
• Include up to 20,000 characters of JavaScript in your Analytics box (up from 2,000)

While you’ll have a lot more room to include all kinds of additional widgets with these relaxed limits, you’ll want to think about performance before overloading your Ning Network with every widget you can find. We've written before about the 4-second rule and the importance of keeping your Ning Network speedy, and we'll continue to suggest that you stay well under these limits. But we also want to give you the creative control and customization you've been asking for on the Ning Plus and Ning Pro plans.

On the flip side of things, we’ve identified a key area where we need to build in some limits: invitations. Today, there's essentially no limit to the number of invitations you and your members can send out. That's not okay for a few  reasons:

1. Potential for abuse: A spammer might join, add a blog post, and share it with thousands of email addresses.
2. It hurts Ning’s email delivery reputation when any single Ning Network sends out millions of invitations. Ning’s email delivery reputation is what decides whether something like a Broadcast message reaches your members' inbox or their spam folder.

To uphold a superior email delivery reputation, we’ll be allowing Ning Plus Creators and Admins to send up to 5,000 invitations per month. Ning Pro Creators and Admins will be able to send up to 10,000 invitations per month. (Any invitations that aren't pending — that get accepted — won't be calculated in these limits.)

Members will be able to send up to 50 invitations per day on Ning Plus and Ning Pro networks. As for uploading lists, we've seen more spam abuse and fewer conversions when members upload their own CSV files, so we'll be removing that option for members — but keeping it available for Creators and their Admins.

There are a lot more things we’ll be doing to improve email delivery (including digests!), but placing reasonable limits on invitations is an obvious place to start. If you'll be on the Ning Plus or Ning Pro plan, we invite you to contact us directly if you're looking to send out invitations beyond these limits; we'll work with you to arrive at the best solution.

[solo]

i like ...2 thumbs up.

[Jorge]

People join a network when someone invites them, and if the number of invitations from a low net (50 per day) also lower growth. This affects large networks. You no social network limits you to invite all your contacts.

[Patrick Chappelle]

you obviously missed the point of why the limits are being set which is far more important than invitation limits.

[Jorge]

The problem is that many developers have abused the tool that gave ning, with which you can send a message to all its members. Or have added images within email messages. So email clients take them for spam. But a limit. I believe that this solution is worse than the problem.

[Monique]

Fair, but I would put the member limit at 100 per day instead of 50...Most people will have more than 50 contact in their email address book...Everything else seems workable.

[Patrick Chappelle]

yes, but you could always invite the other 50 tomorrow. ;)

[Jorge]

I have to invite 50 to 50 would be daunting for those who want to invite more than 1000 contacts.

[Donna Mac]

Sounds fair to me.

[Thomas Hoey]

Me too. More than that number of invites a day could be considered spamming, in itself.

[Patrick Chappelle]

i like this. i would add that i'd like to be able to invite contacts from other social networks like facebook or myspace.

[solo]

that would be great too

[Janettee McCrary]

Agreed:)