my list of things ning migrators will mkiss
Ning To Jamroom
ok frustrations with ning and mind u i was the biggest supporter of 3.0 and tried hard to quiet the negativity wich i think was what really was killing ning even more then glams takeover and then nings communication blackout
but with ning itself where to start
on 2.0 contstant bugs that were random and not affecting eniugh people to get attention and the 2.0 mobile site killed me!
oh and refusal to listen to seo common sdence like a proper sitemap that listed everyurl not just the 5 features (forums blogs members videos etc it literaly had only 5-10 urls in a sitemasp of a site with 1/5 million urls)
and they had numerouse identicly h1 errors more then 1 h1 on a page issues
id bring these up backed up with statements from the top seo guys in the world and theyd point to a forum post where no nothings were speculating without any knowledge wether it mattered or not
2.0 was slow alot ..bloated really
i paid attention to my network so i caught bugs faster then anyone and i doubt a week went by that i wasnt on the phone with tech support sometimes 2 or 3 times a week and id say less then 1/2 the bugs ifd report got fixed ..some after 2 years seemed to fix themselves
3.0 that hasd (had/has?) alot of potential but they were forcing thier label on it (i didnt mind so much but that caused a riot) and the development times were insanely slow they promiced it would take a few months till i ciuld migrate and id have a year after that to migrate b4 2.0 was shut down so i made both live so my members could get used to it and use it
a year later hardly anything was done and thier prioritization was mind boggling
i mean it had a design studio and it had an activity feed but lacked vids anbd events ..and we ciuld not migrate till the features existed to mifgrate into or lose all our data
so 2 months go by then 3 or 4 and what do they release a new version of design studio ..
then 40-6 months go by and a slkight update toi the activity feed
at wich point they asked us to fill out a poll and tell them what features we believe shiould come 1st and they would post the results next week
the next week they post "we wilol no longer be communicating on the creators forums except to post updates" 6 more monthgs go by..maybe only 4 who knows it still says "we will post tyhe results of the opoll next week" and were working on thed activity feed and api..activity feed being out for minths and api being probably the most time consuming project that less then 1% use or know how to use
so were left in the dark strumelia and oithers started speculating that theres noone left at ning doing anything at all
but thats ning the company
ning the platform
i hated the search results that was the worse and i used the google search i added instead
the built in social stuyff like like buttons hardly ever worked
they took away webdav so i couldnt upload my sitemaps and had to use a subdomain on a seperate server or email themn to suport to upload
i also used webdav for css editss as i went over the css limit (3.0 gave u 6 times as much css space tho)
ohh the low quality vids limited to 10 min and 100 mb
i always used youtube then embed
alotta ppl complained about the delay in the activity feed it usualy wasnt too long but sometimes could be (trying to get into every thing i can think of here) ..on my site in the chat 1st messages to an admin always came up blank unless i reply then hard refresh (then still sometimes were lost) if i didnt reply b4 refreshing theyd always be lost
umm
poor seo control was a big thing
you know when i joined the entrire post was taken and put in the description meta a meta desc should be 160 char max
on 1 page it was over 4,000 words nit chatachters..words
nearly doubling the text size
when i pointed that out to them they said it didnt matter but theyd take a note of it ..i think it was a year or 2 before it was fixed
in 2.0 a ning site looked like a ninfg site looked like a ning site yea style variations but at a glance u knew it was a ning site 3.0 ofered more flexability but still there were i think 5 layout options (as far as hesader with 2 colums below 3 column 2 column left or right sidebar or 1 full page)
at least 3.0 u could have diferent layouts on diferent pages
1 pet peave given the nature of mky members
according to nings tos the vatican is a porn shop
mind yiu theres absoluteoky no porn or sexualixzed nudity on my site at all but theres a few of ppl swimming in a creek or a nursing mother or a video documentary of the omo people (find it on my site its beautiful) and just some pf my members will take a photo of thier hair after getting out of tyhe shower and not even realize a niple can be seen on the very edge
but ning if they knew of therse perfectky innocejt photos would pull them
they did have excelent spam protection....most of the time but when it failed wed be swamped in spam
oh unrelated kinda but just popped into my heasd i installed allone social links but havent checked how it works
but 1 thing ive always wanted is a built in social share widget like sharethis or addthis ..but built in since those alweays seem to double load times
back to complaining about ning
id say the absolute biggest disapointment was when they went from :were listening to every suggestion and will try to incorporate them all" to "were not listening or responding at all)
the week they announced 3.0 the president of ning was posting on creatiors daily
before that there were dozens of staff that posted and felt like freinds
and then there was only 1
and then she left
and soon after we were all left wondering whats going on
craziest part of all is daily there were posts about 'nings planning on shutting down" 'they are holding us hostage' "glam only bought ning to destroy it"
and not 1 whisper to set the record straight
it was crazy
like they no longer cared if everyone that came to ning saw pl ranting about nings out to get us
i tried and i tried and i tried to keep as level head and intergect some sensibility and possitivity
but nings silence was overwhelming
factors that lead me to consider jr
1 my mobile trafics between 65% and 85% now
though the sitemap lists 1.5 million pages the mobile sitemap lists 7,000
the mobile sites bounce rates way way higher then the main site
mobile users that did stick around had trouble doing just about everythijng
now 3.0 would solve this ..and i was happy with 3.0
but the waiting.. and not knowing i couldnt wait 6 more months..or a year..i needed a mobile ready solution now
the built in shop potentials a huge plus i offer my members free shops at shops.dreadlockssite.com but zencart shops 99 people requested shops 4 set them up 2 i did all the setup the other 2 about 1/2
when i posted about the fact the new site can have shops and that id offer afar better deal then etsy several righgt away said they would love to move to our site and redirect the trafdic from etsy to us
i love that customixzatiins in our hands even though i dont know how to yet
i love that if we wanbt a module we can create a module and share it
webdav was originaly granted because of a site called scriptsfning that and creators andjensocial and others were a wealth of code help design help etxc
but ning bought scriptsforning then closed it promicing to invcorporate most of the scripts but never doing it
recently those scripts ppl still use stopped working andthey caht access them
oh my point is (no sleep again so rambling and typo-ing like crazy) point is that creators on ning have skills mad skills they love to share
but were limited to some simple js and css and thier hands were tied always waiting on ning for the big features the modules
if some of those real smart coders come here u will see modules coming out that will do all sorts of crazy things
oh jnust to finish off the rant
when creators was upgrading to 3.0 i begged them to alow a design contest or at least let some of the creative creators help make creators creative
when it was released it just semed sterile
like no thought was out into tyhe design whatsoever
ok rant over
im sure ill think of more platform related things later
updated by @soaringeagle: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM
