NING can you please make one small change to the Network Privacy function?

I have just joined Ning. After doing a fair bit of research, I decided that Ning, while not the perfect option, is the best available right now. I have set my Network to invitation only, but what I would really love is a 'guest' or 'visitor' access option for potential new members to have a look.

Let's keep it real... What happens to me whenever I have my site set to "See Everything" is I got a few male visitors to the site who seem to go through EVERY female profile on the site!!! It's more than a little creepy and sometimes I worry about the safety of my female members.

I would like to have people browse profiles but when it is see everything these guys aren't forced to "show themselves" and post a profile too. If they could just see a few then get cut off that would be a more practical use of this privacy function, In addition to letting people see "linked to" content. Having a "sample network" mode would address both of these issues.

The other downside of locking down the whole site is that when content shows up in google and people click on it, it goes to the homepage. I highly doubt anyone is going to log in and go through the trouble of trying to find what they were originally looking for.

Hello anyone from Ning can you please respond to this??? I have been one of your paying customers for over a year and I don't think this is an outrageous request.

I think I am blacklisted here! lol

A reply from Ning would be nice!

Phil thanks for your response I understand that this will entail a cookie injection, and would indeed be very complicated, but it is a shame this is not more of a priority. It limits our options to either completely give away content without there being any real motivation for people to join the site. It really limits the ability to promote our networks outside the site. My Twitter and Facebook page were excellent sources of traffic for my network but I found that people were not joining, hell even members of my network wouldn't even bother to log in! As soon as I changed the privacy setting to Semi Private I had over 40 new members sign up over the span of a week and a half!

There has got to be a half step here that can help facilitate some form of off site promotion?

Derek

P.S. I update my network content daily!

NING!!!!

I'm dying my traffic has plummeted without the Twitter/Facebook traffic!!! I understand my original request might be too complicated to address right now. How about this... The option to set all my members profiles to "Members Only" Or can that be the default? I just do not like my network being able to be skimmed by anyone trolling for God knows what! Some of my members are using their real names and I am just not comfortable with letting people "creep" around all their profiles! However I could use the additional traffic.

Can you help me out or not?

NING can I please have a way to set my members profiles to "members only"?

I would even go a little bit further. I think it would be great if I could mark each blog, forumpost, note or whatever as members only or even assign them to the different levels of members I can create in NING. Especially with notes which are most used as normal webpages it would be nice if I could keep some of them (semi) private.

Ning come on you must do something about this! Don't you think people by default want and expect some form of privacy? You are truly missing the boat here by not having the default setting for profiles "Members Only". That combined with the "See Everything" option would allow a lot more sampling of networks! NO ONE IS SAYING THAT YOU SHOULD CLONE FACEBOOK!!! However at this point there are clearly some "best practices" out there that cannot be ignored! I want to be able to open up all the other content of my network to the outside but not my Members profiles. Why should I have to send new members a tutorial about setting their profiles to members only as soon as they sign up? I think that implies that the network they just joined is somehow inferior because it can't do it for them.

In addition this doesn't affect Ning.com in any way so why the hold up?

OK Everyone until Ning changes this function here is what I had to do to make it more difficult for people to browse all my member pages while keeping my network OPEN and able to be used for linking to by Twitter, Facebook, Etc. In addition as mentioned in another thread you will not be able to use Google Webmaster Tools effectively without being completely public. So here goes, I tinkered for hours but hopefully this will help deter excessive snooping.

1. TAKE Members OFF the Main page. Yep that's right you are going to have to remove Members and Birthdays. Now depending on your design this might make things screwy so be prepared to have to shift things around a bit to accommodate this.

2. Make all tabs or as many as possible, visible only to members. This is especially true of photos, events, blogs, forums, groups. You are going to have to use tab manager for this one.

3. Now for the harder part. Go to the Language editor and remove "View All" by placing a blank space in it's place p> span> /span> /p>. This is very important because it removes it everywhere a non member might see it like "view all" friends, etc. Now this will make some things more difficult for your members to navigate to but IMHO it is worth it.

I couldn't make everything not visible without really altering the layout of my main page so groups and latest activity are still visible. However I moved them "below the fold" so they stand out a lot less. I hope this helps.

Derek

Or maybe you could use some thing similar to the TAB options. For each tab you can select who can view the item ("every one", "Members" or "Admin") . You guys at Ning could consider setting some thing like this for each page to decide who can and cannot see each page.