Ning Wishlist for 2011

[Product Ideas & Suggestions]

Point Ning in the right direction for 2011. List your top 5 needs to help you manage and grow your network.

[Carlos Tabora]

1. Activity commenting and liking throughout the site including forum posts and status updates (with notifications on new comments and likes received from other members)

2. Leaderboard enhancements including points/rewards system

3. Advanced Analytics so we can see what content is the most popular and which members are the most active

4. Ability to rate forum discussions like you can with photos and videos currently

5. Ability to custom design your sign-up page (not profile questions)

[Chris]

After much pondering, here's my list. Hope it's not too late to be considered by Ning. Mine aren't really for new features, but what I consider to be vital tools in network management that are currently missing or have recently been removed. It's frustrating for the members, and embarrasing for us, when we have to go to Ning to fulfil their requests for basic support procedures.

 

1. Enable NC's to search members by email (unless I'm missing something.....?), duplicate names, similar profiles etc - analyse our membership!
   
2. Enable NC's to fully edit member profiles, layouts, profile answers, ALL content items, in fact, any damn thing they want to! All attributes of all content should be accessible. I might need to help a member with their email settings, or make a picture private or a blog post puclic at their request, or change their email for them etc. etc. This includes being able to annotate profiles, so we can leave ourselves notes about people "e.g. asked them to swear/curse less on 14/5/08"
   
3. Enable NC's to see who invited whom, and when; to manage friend requests accross the network (easy way to spot unhelpful activity); and to manage / filter / autoflag private messages. We need full control! It's emabrrassing to say to members "I can't look at your messages / friend requests" when they think you're in control of the network!
   
4. 10 levels of membership that we can set access to each area of the site individually; and as none, read-only, read & write, power user etc. I'm talking in as much detail as individual forum topics, individual groups etc. Each major content item should have these settings, and sensible defaults for new items. These levels could be paid or not. We should also be able to prevent some levels from sending messages, friend requesting, or adding comments to profiles and/or other content items (by type e.g. videos, blogs etc.)
   
5. Total control over gifts - the option to set whatever prices we want, for any gift, including FREE. It's ueless to many of us otherwise. Plus transparency of the purchasing, and the ability to "pause" it - remove it without losing gifts people have already given. e.g. put it up for holidays and not at other times.

 

It's all about Enabling us to manage our networks properly. Weed out the bad eggs, help the non-technical members, fix issues and reassure our members that we're in control.

 

There are a ton more, and probably 3 vitally important ones will spring to mind after I've posted this, but this will do for now.

 

Another thought I had was the incentivisation of Creators - if you provide good, valid help here, you get a discount off your costs. That would increase and encourage the support here (though some already do give a lot - tj, thunder, jen etc.) and take the load off the help centre a bit so my important tickets get answered more quickly! ;-)

 

[TJ @ jQueryHelp]

Another thought I had was the incentivisation of Creators - if you provide good, valid help here, you get a discount off your costs. That would increase and encourage the support here (though some already do give a lot - tj, thunder, jen etc.) and take the load off the help centre a bit so my important tickets get answered more quickly! ;-)

 

I like your idea! :D
Best wishes,
"TJ"

[Donna Mac]

Maybe this was brought up...BUT, in my shout message which is connected to S4N, the whole concept is great except that it doesn't change for quite a while....which I never did understand. Why can this not be instant?

Also, Is NING going to give us the ability to have a "status" area for our members that can be commented on?  Like Facebook?  That is soooo much better than the box that just allows members to say something and it just shows up in the recent activity feed and no one can comment one way or the other.

[Sofus Midtgaard]

1. Weekly email digest of top activity to all members like on LinkedIn (Can't believe it isn't there yet)
2. Auto update your Ning status via Twitter

Pretty basic stuff - with huge impact...

[Donna Mac]

I hate it that the NING email notifications are all checked by default.  I've lost many members because they can't stand getting all of those emails and don't even know to ask how to stop it.  UGH UGH UGH

[Vanwetswinkel Marc]

1. Auto pop up of the chatbox if someone sends you a private chat message and a more visible chat notification if someone posts a message in main chat (now there is only a small gray rectangle flashing in the bottom right corner of the screen that nobody notices because everybody looks at the center of their screen and that disappears if you change page)

2. An extra role that allows admins to assign members that can send broadcast messages to all members (told to be "working on" a year ago :-)

3. More recent activity items on the main page (20 is not enough, if you don't log in for 2 days you miss a lot of recent activity). Something like 50 would be nice, or better, a "Show More"-button at the bottom of recent activity that shows 10, 20, 30, ... more each time you click it.

4. Recurring Events. Would be nice for example for courses, meetings etc. Just make one event and click some "Repeat"-button. Then you can choose daily or weekly or monthly, or ..., followed by the amount. Like for example a course, weekly for 7 weeks, would create 7 events with the same description, hours etc on the same day with only the date changed. After that, one has only to change the detailed information for each event without having to make 7 different events with a lot of copy-pasting.

5. More Apps.

[Kato Hammond]

Hi....   I'm not sure how to really word this, but is there a way to allow people on my Ning network site site to embed content from other sites (i.e., articles, if they choose) by using a simple link from that other site?

In other words, kind of like on Facebook, if you post the link of an article from another site, a brief summary of that article (to include images) will show up, linking viewers to the original article from the other site.

Can that be done here?

Thank you!

[Bree]

• Improve the forum - have a "view unread posts" button or alternatively show newest post first in discussion threads. Allow merging of discussion threads. Like/Dislike or Thank you ratings for forum posts

• When Ning makes a change that affects the way my members use my site, include simple instructions that I can give my members to follow

• Ability to modify the layout of main page and profile pages where we can set the layout and # of columns or better still adopt Brian's Idea

Have some form of live interaction with Ning technical support, I would be quite willing to stay up to 4am my time if it meant I could have a real time response, it is too easy to fob off customers with the present system and incredibly frustrating. I  have only reported one issue since Ning started charging, it took several weeks to get a response which  did not fix the problem  (it still exists) and did not address what I felt was a legitimate concern.

[Michael H]

Only one thing, the ability to copy an event. I'd rather have a "copy" feature than "recurring events". Easier for my event organizers to understand, less risk for mistakes. See http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/why-isnt-there-a-recurring?co...

[Vanwetswinkel Marc]

Indeed, the ability to copy would be great too. Thanks for the link. Unbelievable that thread is over 1 year old and still no ability to have such a basic feature. All those efforts to link to other networks while on the ning-site itself, people are unable to communicate properly: prehistoric chat, prehistoric forum, only 20 recent activity items, not able to comment on recent activity, no broadcast e-mail, no who's online, and I probably forget some other basic communication features, pffff.

[Ryan Jacobs]

1. A customizable paypal checkout app.

 

Right now, we simply can't bring in any revenue using the business model we want. Once we can, we can do things like afford to pay for Ning Pro. Win-win :)

 

2-5. See #1. All we need is a decent way to get cash flow.