announcement - Announcements from Ning - Ning Creators Social Network2024-03-29T07:09:04Zhttps://creators.ning.com/announcements-from-ning/feed/tag/announcementGroups 3.0 Beta is Now Available!https://creators.ning.com/announcements-from-ning/groups-3-0-beta-is-now-available2013-07-26T00:58:12.000Z2013-07-26T00:58:12.000ZAllison Leahyhttps://creators.ning.com/members/AllisonLeahy<div><p><span style="font-size: 13px;">We are very excited to invite each of you to participate in the Groups 3.0 Beta. We’ve redesigned the Groups feature for Ning 3.0 to include just about everything you’ve requested over the last few years, and are ready to share with you this labor of love. Since you guys are the inspiration behind the updated feature, we're especially interested to hear what you think. If you have some time over the next few weeks, please take this new feature for a test drive -- and bring your best community advocates along for the ride!</span></p>
<p><b><a href="http://creators.ning.com/group/ning-3-0-groups-beta-testers" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/555825?profile=original" class="align-right" height="147" width="144"></a>Who</b>: Any Network Creator with a Ning 3.0 Network. If you haven’t experimented with a Ning 3.0 Network yet and are currently managing a 2.0 Network, you can sign up for a free Ning 3.0 Sandbox subscription by joining <a href="http://creators.ning.com/groups/the-sandbox" target="_self">The Sandbox</a> group and following the instructions outlined there. And if you're not already a member, you’ll also need to join Creators.ning.com.</p>
<p><b>How</b>: Join the <a href="http://creators.ning.com/group/ning-3-0-groups-beta-testers" target="_self">Ning 3.0 Groups Beta Testers</a> and follow the instructions to turn Groups 3.0 on for your Ning 3.0 Network. Take a test drive and post your feedback! <span><br></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-4"><b>Re-introducing Groups</b></span></p>
<p>For those of you who’ve never used Groups on Ning, this feature gives your members the ability to self-organize around sub-topics. Groups are a great way to increase <a href="http://creators.ning.com/page/member-engagement" target="_self">member engagement</a> in larger networks. Members can find other members with similar interests and, as a result, are less likely to be overwhelmed by the large number of members and volume of content. I’ve seen members create Groups based on a country, region, city, language, album, book, character, actor, sub-genre of music, area of practice, pet breed, profession, and more.</p>
<p>Groups are also a powerful solution for Network Creators with a business model or community concept based on multiple sub-groups of members. For example, teachers use Groups for online classes, to supplement offline classes, and as a way to help alumni continue to exchange ideas after a class has ended. Groups are frequently used for mentoring or support groups, for organizing offline activities (e.g., a cycling group), private team collaboration, beta testing, focus groups, management of a community, and for premium memberships (e.g., a fan club with access to premium content). Groups also provide an opportunity to sell sponsorships and monetize your community. And, they can do so much more! We’re very interested to learn the many ways your community will be using the Groups 3.0 feature on your network.<b style="font-size: 13px;"> </b></p>
<p><span class="font-size-4"><b>So what’s new in the initial beta release? </b></span></p>
<ul>
<li><b>Supergroups</b>: Each Group can now operate nearly as its own full-featured network. Group admins can add multiple instances of Blogs, Forums, or Photos to each Group.</li>
<li><b>Customization</b>: You can add a Group cover photo, customize menu items (navigation), specify what Group members are called (e.g., members of the cyclists group can be called cyclists), and modify the Group URL. You can also add custom pages with multiple layout options.</li>
<li><b>Automation</b>: You can now put members into Groups automatically based on profile questions! You can also manually add members through the member management page in your dashboard.</li>
<li><b>Enhanced Control</b>: By popular request, we eliminated the concept of Group ownership – there are now only Group Administrators (no succession planning needed). You (The Network Creator or Administrator) specifies who can create Groups and who can view the Group hub page. We’ve also given you granular controls to specify, in general, whether Group Admins can customize their Group cover photo, features or layout, or message Group members. And it is also possible to override the default setting for a specific Group.</li>
<li><b>Sponsorship</b>: You now have the option to add header and footer HTML boxes to each Group. Control the ad code yourself or give Group admins the ability to run their own advertising.</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><span class="font-size-4"><b>Wait, there’s more! </b></span></p>
<p>We are working on completing Group invitations and plan to release this functionality in 2-3 weeks. We also plan to release one other long-requested new feature soon after Groups 3.0 comes out of beta: the ability to move content! NCs will be able to move content such as a forum topic from a Group to the network, from the network to Groups, or between Groups. </p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13px;">I hope you are as excited about Groups 3.0 as we are! We look forward to getting valuable feedback from you, and are very interested to see how each of you takes advantage of the new capabilities.</span></p>
<p> </p></div>Coming to Groups: Add Pages, change privacy settings and more [now live]https://creators.ning.com/announcements-from-ning/coming-to-groups-add-pages2011-05-26T21:00:23.000Z2011-05-26T21:00:23.000ZEvanhttps://creators.ning.com/members/Evan<div><p><a href="http://blog.ning.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Groups-pages-large.jpg"><img width="616" height="466" src="http://blog.ning.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Groups-pages-small-1.jpg" title="Groups-pages-small-1" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-25874" /></a><br />
<strong>[Note]: This release is now live.</strong></p>
<p>Groups are about to get a whole lot better.<br />
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Later next week, we'll be rolling out a slew of improvements to the Groups feature, one of the most popular features on the Ning platform. We're doing this based directly on <a href="http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/tell-us-about-groups">feedback from Creators</a>.<br />
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First, groups creators and administrators will be able to add static pages to a group. Added pages will be featured prominently on the group's home page, which will make it easier to share knowledge or information with group members (or potential members).<br />
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Second, group creators and administrators will soon be able to change the privacy settings of an existing group. Today, privacy settings are locked and unchangeable when a group is created. You'll soon be able to change this at will. We've also redesigned the privacy settings to be a lot easier to use and understand.<br />
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Lastly, we're enhancing or fixing a slew of issues and flows within the Groups feature, including:</p>
<ul>
<li>Adding "Alphabetical" as a way to sort groups on the list of groups on a Ning Network</li>
<li>Limiting group deletion priviledges only to group moderators, network admins and Network Creators</li>
<li>New members of groups will no longer, by default, get notified when other people join their group</li>
<li>Better warning message for members viewing invite-only groups</li>
<li>Better warning message for members who've been suspended from a group</li>
</ul>
<p>Keep reading for a full breakdown of what's coming for Pages in groups and privacy settings.<br />
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<strong>Pages inside Groups</strong><br />
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[Note: This feature will only be available to English networks initially, and all networks in the coming weeks, once we've translated the feature into all languages.]<strong><br /></strong><br />
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Perhaps you want to add a schedule for a group that is dedicated to fans of a particular baseball team. Or, maybe you want to create a list of important lesson plans for a class-based group. Instead of having to start a discussion in the group and share documents, group creators and administrators will be able to create a static page and simply add the information there. This enhancement should make Groups more versatile and powerful.<br />
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Pages within a group will act just like a normal page, in most respects. The creator of a page can choose to enable or disable comments, and the page will be accessible via the group's home page. Note that any pages added within a group won't be added to a Ning Network's "All Pages" directory. To avoid confusion, group pages will stay in their own group.<br />
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There's nothing Network Creators need to do to enable this feature. It will be available to all group creators and administrators when this release is complete, athough group members won't see anything different until a page is actually added.<br />
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There's no limit to the number of pages that can be added, so group creators have ultimate flexibility in creating Groups Pages.<br />
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<strong>Redesigned, changeable group privacy settings</strong><br />
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As long as the Groups feature has been around, privacy settings for each group have been locked immediately after the creation of that group. Additionally, in terms of privacy, someone in the process of creating a new group has always seen a single "Privacy" setting. Additional options (like being able to make a group invite-only) would only appear after a group creator decided to turn on member moderation. We've tackled both of these issues for this release.<br />
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Groups creators and administrators will be able to change the privacy settings for a group at any point in time, for both new and existing groups. This adds a huge degree of flexibility to the Groups feature.<br />
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On top of allowing settings to be changed at any time, groups privacy settings will soon be a lot easier to use and understand. Instead of <a href="http://blog.ning.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/New-Group.jpg">today's settings</a> where there exists that single, expandable privacy choice, we've sliced each choice a group creator makes — who can view, who can join and who can send invites, as well as member moderation — into separate options:<br />
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<strong><a href="http://blog.ning.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/New-Group-large.jpg"><img width="616" height="540" src="http://blog.ning.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/New-Group-small.jpg" title="New Group-small" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-25876" /></a></strong><br />
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This change allows group creators and administrators to create a group that anyone can see but only invited people can join, or an invite-only group where members still have to be approved. These, along with some others, are configurations that aren't available today.<br />
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These changes should make the Groups feature much more useful and flexible. And stay tuned: There's more to come!</p>
</div>