Athena's dashboard

Hi Groovy,

Yes, your social network needs to be completely public for Google to see into it and verify it. Google is not able to see into private social networks.

The help text on the Advanced Options page doesn't specify that you need to be completely public and we're going to clarify that shortly. Thank you for pointing that out.

Thanks!
Athena

Hi all,

With the release last night you can now easily verify your social network with Google Webmaster tools. To do this, go to your Manage page and click "Advanced Options." We have a lightweight tutorial on the 4 steps you'll need to take to verify your social network from there.

For more info, check out this tutorial in the Help Center: http://help.ning.com/cgi-bin/ning.cfg...

Best,
Athena

Hi Chris and URDead2,
Would you mind dropping us a note through the Help Center at help.ning.com so we can investigate this? If you already have, please post your Help Center ticket number here.

Thanks,
Athena

Hi Frank, dshanahan and EJM,

We absolutely hear you that each social network is different! We profile social networks on the Ning blog every day, and taste first hand the incredible diversity and the amazing things you guys are doing with your social networks. One of the exciting projects we're working on right now is the ability for you to add network-wide applications to your social network, increasing the number of features available. Network-wide applications are coming in mid-June (http://blog.ning.com/2009/04/the-next...). This project is aimed at increasing the number and diversity of the features you can add to your social networks, allowing you to further customize your social network right down to the very specific features that fit your unique needs.

We love getting feedback from passionate Network Creators, and I actually wrote a blog post a few days ago about how feedback is processed here at Ning HQ (http://blog.ning.com/2009/04/what-hap...). Basically, we prioritize and triage feedback from the one million social networks on Ning and meet weekly with our product and engineering teams about how best to incorporate your feedback. Many features we’ve added to the product over the past 2 years have been a direct result of your feedback. A good example recently is the ability to add multiple levels of administrators to your social network — we heard from a lot of Network Creators of large social networks that they needed more help with moderation but didn’t want to turn over admin rights to too many people. With this feature, you can grant moderation rights over any piece of content or feature to any member.

We are paying attention to the top feature requests you all are listing here, but please feel free to also contact us in the Help Center (http://help.ning.com) with your thoughts and feedback.

Best,
Athena

Hi,

I wanted to let you know that if you'd like to edit or remove the "About this social network" box and "Create your own social network" links on your social network, you'll need to purchase the Remove Promotion Links premium service. Removing or editing these links without purchasing the premium services breaks our Terms of Service, which I know isn't your intention here.

For more details, check out Section 11 of our Terms of Service (http://about.ning.com/tos.php#11)."

Best,
Athena

Hi Brian,

Would you mind dropping us a note through the Ning Help Center (http://help.ning.com) and we'll see what we can do about raising the limit on a case-by-case basis? Thanks!

Hi Joseph,

Do you mind dropping us a note through the Help Center (help.ning.com) and we'll see what we can do in terms of raising the limit?

Best,
Athena

PS Your social networks sound really interesting! I'd encourage you (and anyone else reading this) to check out our newly launched http://nc.ning.com, watch the stories there, and submit your own story.

Hi Connie,

We’ll definitely be popping by here but our goal was for Get Satisfaction to be an independent place for Network Creators to help each other and share tips. If you do have questions for us at Ning— or are having an issue with your social network— we’re happy to work with you one on one if you drop us a note in the Ning Help Center since that’s where we spend most of our time. All of the articles we’ve put together to help you with your social network are in the Ning Help Center and we’ll be sifting through the forum topics in Network Creators to move the best info to the Help Center.

Best,
Athena – Athena, on April 24, 2009 03:04

Hi! You were right to look at status.ning.com first. Our team was posting there at the same time I was commenting here so it may not have shown up for a few minutes.

Thanks,
Athena – Athena, on April 24, 2009 01:36

Hi Baba Mama,

We're working on this right now and will be posting updates on our progress on the Status Blog: http://status.ning.com.

Thank you!
Athena

Hi! Thank you for reporting this. Our engineers are investigating the issue right now.

Thanks,
Athena

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you know that I really appreciate all of the feedback here, and I've passed it on to our product team.

Best,
Athena

Hi Leon,

That does sound like a really frustrating experience and should definitely not be happening. I haven't had this experience before but if any Network Creators have, and have fixed it, it would be great to hear what worked for you.

We'd also be happy to investigate this for you and work with you on it one on one if you drop us a note in the Ning Help Center: http://help.ning.com

Best,
Athena

Hi Robert,

I'm sorry to hear you haven't received a response from us. We aim for 24 hour responses from the Ning Help Center during the week. I've forwarded this URL to our support team and you'll hear back from them shortly.

Best,
Athena

Hi John,

I appreciate the feedback and wanted to respond to a few of your points. Comments are now allowed on that blog post— and every post we put up. We weren’t aware that blog comments were not enabled on that post until we read your reply here and we’ve fixed it. Thanks for letting us know about that.

We also just changed the blog post title. It was not at all meant to be condescending— it actually originated from a ton of feedback from Network Creators over the past few months— but I can now see how it could be taken that way. That wasn’t our intention at all and we’ve modified it.

In trying to figure out how to best evolve the Ning Network Creators social network, we wanted to provide a place that's about you, our Network Creators, and not about us. We were drawn to Get Satisfaction because it's independent and open and was built for people-powered support.

Thanks,
Athena