DerekB's dashboard

Stone Head I couldn't agree more. We need to have a seamless transition from when we leave to when the new site is live.

Scott,

Let me apologize to you dude... I know I might not have made the most soothing of comments in the other thread about gifts but my bombastic comments were meant to shake people up and get them thinking. It seems as though my tactics might have had a small impact on you and I don't want to just throw bombs and not clean up after myself. I am in a similar boat as you are and looking to make a change. I am making a final decision between two other products out of the 10 that JP alluded to. My frustration has been with NCs that are all too content to get on Getsatisfaction and rant but then not take any action!!! Why should NING change? All they have to do is have very polite and efficient customer service staff come on here and sooth us with platitudes. Scott I have had email exchanges with high up people working for whitelabel providers and when I explain that I have a Ning network that I need to migrate they respond that they have no real solutions available because there is no real demand.... NO REAL DEMAND?... That tells me two things:

1. People are too afraid or too intimidated by the process of migrating to a different solution/provider.

2. NCs are content to stay with NING even after they rant on GetSatisfaction (or previously on Network Creators).

Scott I can't tell you how appalling I find the lack of real initiative by soo many of the professed disgruntled NCs. I took it upon myself to see how difficult some of these other solutions really are to set up and administer. Scott you wanna know a secret... Some are a breeze! I mean incredibly easy! I will be willing to share more with you about what I found if you would like (including my thoughts on the cost differentials), just not on this site. In addition let me tell you that your worries about losing members can be seriously mitigated IF you choose a solution that has an OPEN sign up system. What I mean is it uses Facebook Connect, and Twitter Connect. If you haven't done so you should have a Facebook Page AND a Twitter account. After I switch believe me these will be ripe grounds to recruit and expand my memberships. Don't be afraid man it will take some work and creativity but it can be done. Follow the link to my blog to contact me. Thanks,

Derek – DerekB, on October 23, 2009 09:03

OHH OMG this is too funny dude! "All I'm asking is that you be amused in silence". So you want me to sht up to make you feel better? LOL! OK you go ahead and whine baby. Mama Ning is gonna come make you feel whole again.

I'm sorry I don't mean to be rude but COME ON!! Really? When is enough going to be enough? Look Ning is great no one is denying that they have a great service. However a lot of you are like me you have just simply outgrown it. Ning is just not for you anymore, hell Ning employess have told others the exact same thing in the past. If it's not laziness that keeps you here what is it? Fear of trying something new or learning a new skill? Sorry I'm from the Midwest US and around here that's just plain LAZY. You want to be inert and stuck you go right ahead.

Of course they want this to be an OPT out service they are trying to make some revenue! $$$$ – DerekB, on October 22, 2009 00:22

LOL! This just keeps getting funnier! Wake up people! Lol!

Whoa! Somebody's underwear is in a bunch! YES you are lazy! What are you hoping for? Ning to change it's course? LOL! If you have 125,000 members, you should have been out at 100,000. That's on you my friend. You have such a looong list of grievances with the company why the hell are YOU still here? Wishful thinking? Dude with all the money you are spending and have spent you need to HIRE a developer to HELP you migrate your site over to something YOU have more control over, or are you going to wait till your community balloons to 200,000? What's it going to take for YOU to start taking YOUR business more seriously?

Ning reps have stated on here that you can get a ONE TIME XML file dump of your network data. That is enough for you to take to a developer and have them manually migrate your site over to the new platform. Do your homework, or is that too much work for you? Get your heads out of the clouds and get to work! I am no different than any of you all this crap with NIng has forced my to stretch and expand my skillset. In an odd way I am actually grateful for that because I don't want to be under the thumb of a company like Ning ever again when it comes to my business. – DerekB, on October 21, 2009 22:26

You people when are you going to learn... It's not NING's fault it's yours! Ning is doing what they have to do to try to monetize the kajillion free networks they also run. It just makes you angry because you might have spent money on premium services. I feel your pain but how many times do you need someone from Ning to come on here and tell you that "they are not a completely white label solution". Stop being such lazy asses and migrate to a solution that is! You've got VBulletin, SocialEngine, Jomsocial, Buddypress, Elg, and more! Come on people! Download Mamp (or Namp) and try these out on your local machines to get a feel for them... Or you can sit and bitch at Ning all day!

On second thought go ahead and bitch some more, it is funny stuff.

OK folks here are really your options if you are looking to move.

1. SocialGo, You know who they are you know their story and now you know that the Evil Genius is no longer working with them. Is this a good or bad thing? Who knows? However this seems to be the most straightforward migration route.

2. SocialEngine - Is very cool and very stable. Please do not be intimidated by hosting your own network!!! YOU CAN do it AND do it well! Here is the main concern with SE, load the wrong plug ins OR the wrong combination of plug ins and things can mover slower than tree sap! So you are going to have to let your members know well in advance that there will be lots of changes while the site becomes as good as it can be. You will definitely be playing around a lot to get the right mix of features because there are a LOT of plugins out that can do add a lot of functionality to your site, A LOT. There are a few Event plugins out there really do add a lot of functions to that section. There are some really good templates out there.

3. Buddypress - I REALLY like Buddypress! It is stable, and you can't beat the price ;-) . OK... There are several plug ins that you need for your new install right off the bat and one of them is the BRILLIANT Events plugin! It does everything that your current events section does. There is even... A Facebook Connect (plug in)... AND Twitter integration (plug in)... say what? These two things alone might make it worth me going BP. Downside... If you are a designer you will be able to coax a very good looking site but if you are like me somewhat deficient in that area you will be perplexed by the fact that because there are NO GOOD TEMPLATES working with the latest release. UGGH!

Before anyone says anything about Jomsocial, I played with that too and the events section is... terrible! :-( I have no idea why, but it is. Go this route and you would LOSE functionality. OK and Elgg is easy to set up and get going but the user experience is just soo different than what you are used to now. I moved it out of the race early on.

To be totally honest there will be a loss or readjustment to the way your site works with events with any of these options. The one minor exception is SE WITH additional Event plug ins.

FYI There are many ISPs that can help you keep things up and running if you host your own site, some better than others. Do some research on your ISP!

Hope this helps!

Why is there still bellyaching on this? This is actually a very GOOD thing. I for one have been hard on Ning and their policies, but in this case they have done us all a solid. Folks... MOVE ON!

What happened here?

Jason can you or anyone from NIng provide more information about what we can expect to receive in a Network Export? There is little information available about this. Thanks in advance. – DerekB, on September 26, 2009 05:56

I saw that SocialGo just added the Twitter connect feature today... Thats a big win in for them.

I don't know Stone Head... I have looked at some of the roadmaps out there and in 1 year there will be A LOT more competition in this space. Keep in mind that's only the companies I KNOW about! Who knows who else is tinkering away right now to be the Ning killer. It seems to be internet history that the first innovator is usually supplanted then removed by an upstart competitor. It has happened time and again. People use a product or service, get frustrated by the limitations and say to themselves "I can do waay better than that". I think you can fill in the blanks of my statement with any number of companies that are either dead or dying because they were out-innovated. At this point Ning could be a couple of lines of code away from complete destruction.

If you think that their competition hasn't been here reading all of our complaints etc. then you just don't understand the way a competitive market works. I think ultimately it was a huge error to move direct customer communication to your customers to this wide open public forum. Its wide open to direct view by the competition! Ning just doesn't act like a company that wants to win... Anything. At least when you had the Networks Creators Network you could MONITOR who was on your customer service site!

Imagine you're a Zuckerberg type kid and you like Ning but think you can do it better. THE FIRST thing a kid like that would do was come here and check out what the paying customers are saying. Then guess what they would do next...

Unless there is a dramatic turnaround, I am thinking maybe there is a year or two left before either a sale, shutdown, or competition swoops in and cleans their clock.

Hmm... I would love to know exactly what "the product team" is working on these days. I have been following some of the other white-label solutions out there and they all are looking very, very interesting. By this time next year there will be several very stable and very innovative products available for NCs that want a more robust solution. Out of respect for Ning I won't rattle the list off but if you do a little research they are not hard to find. Everyday my assessment of Ning's future gets more bleak. They are just not doing enough to keep their customers happy, which is always the fastest road to failure.

No!

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