Ning Plus & Ning Pro: Relaxing Limits, Strengthening Email Reliability
UpdatesFor the launch of Ning Mini, Ning Plus, and Ning Pro coming up on July 20, we’ve been revisiting every limit that’s currently in place on your Ning Network today. And for each of these limits, we’ve been asking: Does it make sense?
We’ve shared many updates on our FAQ page in the past two months, but I wanted to dive in a little deeper here and explain why we’ll be removing limits that don’t make sense anymore and introducing a few additional limits that will ultimately improve the member experience.
As Diego mentioned in the recent Product Roadmap blog post, we’re focusing on Network Creators’ control with our upcoming features. To that point, we’re going to remove and relax a number of limits on the Ning Plus and Ning Pro plans. Here are the highlights of what we’ve already changed:
- Place up to 50 tabs in your Ning Network’s navigation (up from 14)
- Include up to 25 Text Boxes, 25 RSS feeds, and 50 total features on your Main Page
- Include up to 100,000 characters of CSS in your Advanced Appearance (up from 15,000)
- Include up to 20,000 characters of JavaScript in your Analytics box (up from 2,000)
While you’ll have a lot more room to include all kinds of additional widgets with these relaxed limits, you’ll want to think about performance before overloading your Ning Network with every widget you can find. We’ve written before about the 4-second rule and the importance of keeping your Ning Network speedy, and we’ll continue to suggest that you stay well under these limits. But we also want to give you the creative control and customization you’ve been asking for on the Ning Plus and Ning Pro plans.
On the flip side of things, we’ve identified a key area where we need to build in some limits: invitations. Today, there’s essentially no limit to the number of invitations you and your members can send out. That’s not okay for a few reasons:
- Potential for abuse: A spammer might join, add a blog post, and share it with thousands of email addresses.
- It hurts Ning’s email delivery reputation when any single Ning Network sends out millions of invitations. Ning’s email delivery reputation is what decides whether something like a Broadcast message reaches your members’ inbox or their spam folder.
To uphold a superior email delivery reputation, we’ll be allowing Ning Plus Creators and Admins to send up to 5,000 invitations per month. Ning Pro Creators and Admins will be able to send up to 10,000 invitations per month. (Any invitations that aren’t pending — that get accepted — won’t be calculated in these limits.)
Members will be able to send up to 50 invitations per day on Ning Plus and Ning Pro networks. As for uploading lists, we’ve seen more spam abuse and fewer conversions when members upload their own CSV files, so we’ll be removing that option for members — but keeping it available for Creators and their Admins.
There are a lot more things we’ll be doing to improve email delivery (including digests!), but placing reasonable limits on invitations is an obvious place to start. If you’ll be on the Ning Plus or Ning Pro plan, we invite you to contact us directly if you’re looking to send out invitations beyond these limits; we’ll work with you to arrive at the best solution.
I’m excited to hear about the email digest, too. And I’ll ask the same question Craig Zelizer did above … Will your new email digest supplement or take the place of the NutShell application?
Also, will your email digests be available to the sub-networks within a Ning network? Our Ning site uses NutShell for the national-level discussions, but NutShell can not be used for our chapter-level discussions.
I don’t have any details to share about digests yet, but you’ll be able to use Nushell in addition to digests if you like.
Can you expalin from were and how I can Pay for ning Plus for my site without credit card or Paypal….
using money transfer tp ypur acount….
thanks
Jijo
+9743207410
Doha
Can i pay via Bank Wire money transfer? or Liberty reserved
Check out this discussion, GreenerMate. Hope this helps!
1.
I hope that with the new options there is also a choice for the color when we post a blog or discussions.
It is really difficult to post a blog/discussion with the new “rich text” files. When the original text of the message is dark, I can’t change it to a light color to it’s visible to read on my dark background. I need to cc the whole text first either into a note book or mail to change it and then post it.
2.
Are we being notified and receive some kind of a sign up form for the changes on July 20? How do I sign up to the ~ 20$ service?
Namaste, Katharina
Namaste, Katharina! We will be sending you an email on July 20th, as well as messaging you from within your Ning Network’s interface. I don’t foresee any changes to the Blog feature in the near-term.
I want to pay for ning plus plan for my network and i can´t find how or where to click to do it. I apreciate your help.
Thanks!!!
Mariela
I really would like to know if the new services will have Leader-Boards..?
Have you given consideration to increasing the number of RSS feeds within groups? Two or three would do for me.
I don’t believe we have any plans to change how this currently works, although feel free to start a discussion about it on the Creators Ning Network.
I know this is a bit late, but I’ve always wondered…. Ning Mini/Plus/Pro…. Why not a ‘Ning Standard’. I’ve always been a bit perplexed by the great differences between the Mini and the Plus, particularly as 2 gigs storage would be a minimum for me I like to use groups and notes. Something like $10 US a month to have eg. something like 5 gigs storage; 10 text boxes on the main page; up to 10 groups; notes; labels on groups and notes; would be great to upload videos but would cope with embedding; other standard features. Still pondering about what to do next… I have loved using Ning…
Kyle: I agree with you, I like it appears little more like it
The biggest problem is the lack of customization of invites!
All Ning Creators have the same invites that look unprofessional, amateurish, and are filtered like Spam.
Changing the language doesn’t make sense when the layout is not conform to the website.
Another issue is the number limitation character on the broadcast message, this is not ok for professional Html emails who needs more characters to look visually attractive.
2 Elements that are very important to consider paying for a service that is not helping Ning Creators to grow with these limitations.
I hope that Ning Plus will take into account these big issues for Ning Creators.
Thanks!
Lorena, july , 2010 – State -S. Paulo
Dear Sirs,
I own Ning Network for nearly two years. I do not do any kind of
commercial transaction. I need the network because I use it as a means of sending messages
for friends who want to evolve morally and spiritually.
To me it is very important because I am a lecturer, a psychologist, a teacher of Portuguese
English and literature. Since I am retired I live alone (the children married)
Iwork eight hours, posting messages that bring comfort to friends and members
The Network Ning is my food spiritually. Working with love and dedication.
I have 3 Administrators who help me opening groups que go through me first
to be approved, because every message has to have altruistic.
Despite being a teacher and not having a good salary, I’ll choose “PRO PLAN ”
because I need it because music is VERY IMPORTANT for lifting the spirit,
and the videos are very helpful when well selected.
If Gentlemen into my Ning network, you will see what I do is for love and dedication.
I would like to know how I will pay the network Ning. I have a credit card AMERICAN EXPRESS.
I saw that you have accepted the American Express. I have Visa too, but I prefer the American Express Card.
I must know how this payment will be made.I will pay you every month.. Every 10th of each month, I send the payment.
I sincerely hope you answer my questions because I am anxious
to know how everything will happen. I fear losing my network because I will not contact you.
WE WORKED HARD DURING THIS TIME.
Best regards,
MUCH PEACE!
Suely dos Anjos
Many thanks for the Java script and CSS expansion!
The 50 member limit is a problem for growth.
I would suggest an option to expand this the premium accounts. Even a bigger problem is the lack of customization of invites.
They look like spam and it sounds like they have been tagged as spam. Consider adding a way to style them as right now unless I am unaware all you can do is change the language.
Craig, members won’t be able to upload files, but they’ll still be able to import web address books.
We use Ning for our community. It’s awesome and we love it.
But we need better search tools for the members list (in the “manage” tab) so we can combat spam better.
Since you’re taking the opportunity of adding new features and tweaks to the upcoming Ning packages, please consider the option of adding search filters in the members list that specifically “look” inside the member’s email address, description and any additional extra fields added by the admins for registration. Most spam members follow certain patterns, e.g. same domain (e.g. gmaily.com – yes, with a y) or come from the same .TLD (e.g. .ru or .in). Others have invalid website URLs or have spam words in their profiles.
If the members list search can be extended to those additional fields, spamming will be addressed more efficiently than now…
Thank you.
P.S. Our community has over 35,000 members so we know the pain of moderating it through hundreds of spammers.
What about a limitation of the number of invitations available for each member? For exemple, for an invite only network, will we be able to fix a limit of 15 invitations per member?
Thank you
Hi, Youssef! We will set that number by default at 50 for your members of Ning Plus and Ning Pro networks, but it won’t be something you can adjust. You can also turn off invitations if you wish.
I did not like the limits that they place for members to invite their friends and contacts. My Network is a Christian Youth in 02 years and grew to 5,000 members through this this method. I have encouraged everyone to come to invite his friends and many invitations to send their lists of e-mails that have 500 or 1000 contacts. Thus, my growth would be harmed and would not be good for my network if members could only invite 50 contacts.
Dear Ning
Thanks for the continued and clear updates on upcoming features. That is great news that you will be adding a digest feature. I did want to ask is this different than the nutshell mail option that is currently available. Second, I am concerned that limiting member invites and stopping members from uploading their address books will really hurt networks in growing. I think at a minimum members should be allowed to invite a 100 people per day. Also will members still be able to upload their address books as this seems like a huge negative change.
hi,
we had a good thing going on a ning site using it as a sales site for antiques.
greenspot ning com
The # of characters allowed in the picture description field, kinda forced us to reconsider it’s use, after 8 months.
The limits went from ((I’m guessing here, can’t remember exact) about 10,000 characters down to less than 4,000. It became impossible for us to continue using.
We’re now on WordPress, unfortunately, as we saw real potential for our type of biz on ning.
If Ning ever goes back to opening up that limit, let us know, we might hop on again.
For reference: see discussions re: paypal button in photos, and other paypal related threads on Creators.
Sad and frustrating to let ning go as a platform for us, it’s a great piece of software and very agile and friendly.
cheers.
vince.