Dear Network Creators,
Social interaction and sharing have always been at the core of NING’s product. That is why we have implemented a new design for social sharing/liking and added brand-new sharing functionality that will help you promote your content across different social media platforms more efficiently.
From now on, you can share content through Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Viber, Email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Also, sharing options that existed before were optimized in terms of performance, which has had a positive effect on the page loading speed.
To manage your sharing options, simply go to Social Site Manager > Social Sharing.
Checking the boxes will activate the corresponding sharing icons below your posts on pages, such as Blog, Articles, Photo, Video, etc., as well as member profile pages, group pages, and blog bundles (given that the excerpt length is set to “Full text”).
Please note: For sharing options to be displayed, the content has to be set as public in the Privacy settings. Otherwise, the sharing options won't be available.
We hope that the new sharing functionality will bring more value and engagement to your online community!
If you have any questions or feedback regarding the feature, please feel free to let us know!
Replies
Just come across something Ning may be interested in. Noticed that the buttons Do Not show in a Blog or Article list page under each post ( this includes groups ) so thought would do a little testing.
At first I just thought it was me a s was looking on my phone so came back to the computer to check it out and was the same. In forums etc all seems ok so can only think it has something to do with the excerpt coding somewhere as these are the only two features that has that.
Hope this helps unless it is supposed to be this way which would be a bit odd though.
If you want to see what I mean go here and try it:
https://jr-images.ning.com/codes-archive
or blog here:
https://jr-images.ning.com/blog
So in the list page they don't show
If you click on a category then they do
Done some more testing on this, the Social Buttons Will display in the list page if you set the excerpt to full post as you said in the release of the feature so works as expected on that part. So if you set the excerpt length to 250 they do not show in the list page which as expected is how it should work according to your post, However, this doesn't apply to the categories as they still show the Social Buttons in those list pages.
To be honest don't know why you would have to set the excerpt length to full post anyway for them to show up as most creators wouldn't set it that way anyway because the posts would be to long in the display, so why not just have them display no matter how you set the excerpt length.
Hi Bizz,
We do appreciate you doing the testing. Indeed, there is a slight glitch in the logic of this feature when viewing a certain blog/article category. Sharing options should not be shown when viewing a certain blog/article category if the excerpt is not set to Full post. Our tech team is notified and will deal with this issue.
There are a couple of reasons behind the decision to show sharing options on full posts only. The first one is that sharing options slow down the loading speed of pages, so not having them on each item on the listing page has a positive effect on page performance.
And also it makes sense to share something after you read the full post and not a part of it.
Let us know if this addresses your concern.
Best regards,
The NING Team
Hope you can see where I am coming from regarding this post and not taken in a negative way. I love new features and this is a good feature to have.
Ok got what you are saying and guessed that was your thinking but..
Why not just have them show on the top of the Actual Detail Page Only which would then ease any loading issues on the list pages( yes I know that can be done by not setting the full post ). As you mentioned the reason you do not have them show unless it's a full post is because of the slow down of speed of pages, but this is counter productive because if we have to set our posts to full posts then the list pages have to then download more information which could include images, video and text plus the Social Buttons so you are doubling up on the data download so you might as well have the Social Buttons show without having to set to full posts as then it only has to show the social buttons. in that case.
What you say here: " The first one is that sharing options slow down the loading speed of pages, so not having them on each item on the listing page has a positive effect on page performance " which I agree with but you are saying that to have them show we set the post to full post which will then add them to each item in the list page anyway plus all the other data, would't that be even slower then ?
I know some creators like to have full posts to show and if they want to have social buttons as well this adds to the download. I might be an option to add a tick in the blog etc setup page to say if you want them to show in the list page or not so the creator can still have full posts and social buttons but not both on the list page.
Because I mentioned that having a post set to full post does cause issues if it contains images and maybe a lot of text as takes up a lot of room per post which would mean an awful lot of scrolling to get to the next post especially on mobiles. I've seen this before on some other websites that have long posts and to get to the next post in the list if you have to keep scrolling down the user ends up giving up and moves on. I will make a blog post up and set it to full post to show what I mean..
So if you go here I have just added 3 example posts with text, images and video. Now this is only three posts and potentially there are 20 posts per page. The three posts don't look to bad on a desktop but view in a mobile and that is way to much scrolling.
Example blog: https://jr-images.ning.com/full-post-blog-demo
So in conclusion here is my thinking:
Hope you can see where I am coming from regarding this post and not taken in a negative way.
Best Regards
Bizz :-)
Reading this about the social buttons
Please note: For sharing options to be displayed, the content has to be set as public in the Privacy settings. Otherwise, the sharing options won't be available.
They still display if you have set your network to Invite Only, is this correct for them to still show on that setting ?
Hi!
Yes, if you set the registration on your network to "Invite Only" while leaving "Member only" option unchecked social buttons will appear, because "Invite Only" affects only the registration flow. You can have public website with registration only via invitations. Social buttons will be hidden in the case you need to log into the site in order to see the content.
Best regards,
The NING Team
Ok yes I understand that the invite is only for the registration flow but surely the social buttons should only show for members as non members can share content. I tried clicking on the social buttons as a non member and it asked me to log in to the social site I'm going to share to to share the content.
Maybe you should have an option for this to show or hide them for non members.
Also can you explain this bit as does not make sense:
You can have public website with registration only via invitations. Social buttons will be hidden in the case you need to log into the site in order to see the content.
If it was supposed to say that the buttons will not show in the case of a public website with only invitations registration then that bit isn't working as this is the question I asked.
Thanks, Bizz
Hello!
No, sorry, for some reason I was having a hard time explaining :) I was trying to say that the buttons will appear on the network if it is public (even if Invitation-only option is selected) - just as you already described https://take.ms/5wEFO But if the network is Members-only or a certain page is hidden https://take.ms/rsTka then share buttons will not appear even if you have permission to view the page - https://take.ms/Ye6gK here I am logged in as an administrator, and I can see the content, but since it is limited to administrators only in the privacy settings of this page, there are no share buttons.
Best regards,
The NING Team
Anyone else noticed that since this has been added site load times are taking much longer ?
Hello,
We have checked what causes the reduction of the page speed loading.
Facebook shares and likes have counters which request Facebook API.
Because of that, unfortunately, we can't improve that.
Regards,
Alex
Ning Team
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