Hallo liebe Community,

unsere NING-Plattform hat ein paar Updates bezüglich der Gildenseiten vorgenommen, die wir euch nicht vorenthalten wollen.

(Wer des Englischen nicht 100% mächtig ist, mag sich vllt. einfach selbst auf Erkundungstour durch die verschiedenen Seiten und Einstellungsmöglichkeiten begeben. Ich hoffe weiterhin, dass wir diese Informationen so schnell wie möglich in einer übersetzten deutschen Fassung bereitstellen können.)

__________________________

Guilds are about to get a whole lot better.

Later next week, we'll be rolling out a slew of improvements to the Guilds feature, one of the most popular features on the Ning platform. We're doing this based directly on feedback from Creators.

First, Guilds creators and administrators will be able to add static pages to a Guild. Added pages will be featured prominently on the Guild's home page, which will make it easier to share knowledge or information with Guild members (or potential members).

Second, Guild creators and administrators will soon be able to change the privacy settings of an existing Guild. Today, privacy settings are locked and unchangeable when a Guild is created. You'll soon be able to change this at will. We've also redesigned the privacy settings to be a lot easier to use and understand.

Lastly, we're enhancing or fixing a slew of issues and flows within the Guilds feature, including:

• Adding "Alphabetical" as a way to sort Guilds on the list of Guilds on a Ning Network
• Limiting Guild deletion priviledges only to Guild moderators, network admins and Network Creators
• New members of Guilds will no longer, by default, get notified when other people join their Guild
• Better warning message for members viewing invite-only Guilds
• Better warning message for members who've been suspended from a Guild

Keep reading for a full breakdown of what's coming for Pages in Guilds and privacy settings.

Pages inside Guilds

[Note: This feature will only be available to English networks initially, and all networks in the coming weeks, once we've translated the feature into all languages.]


Perhaps you want to add a schedule for a Guild that is dedicated to fans of a particular baseball team. Or, maybe you want to create a list of important lesson plans for a class-based Guild. Instead of having to start a discussion in the Guild and share documents, Guild creators and administrators will be able to create a static page and simply add the information there. This enhancement should make Guilds more versatile and powerful.

Pages within a Guild will act just like a normal page, in most respects. The creator of a page can choose to enable or disable comments, and the page will be accessible via the Guild's home page. Note that any pages added within a Guild won't be added to a Ning Network's "All Pages" directory. To avoid confusion, Guild pages will stay in their own Guild.

There's nothing Network Creators need to do to enable this feature. It will be available to all Guild creators and administrators when this release is complete, athough Guild members won't see anything different until a page is actually added.

There's no limit to the number of pages that can be added, so Guild creators have ultimate flexibility in creating Guilds Pages.

Redesigned, changeable Guild privacy settings

As long as the Guilds feature has been around, privacy settings for each Guild have been locked immediately after the creation of that Guild. Additionally, in terms of privacy, someone in the process of creating a new Guild has always seen a single "Privacy" setting. Additional options (like being able to make a Guild invite-only) would only appear after a Guild creator decided to turn on member moderation. We've tackled both of these issues for this release.

Guilds creators and administrators will be able to change the privacy settings for a Guild at any point in time, for both new and existing Guilds. This adds a huge degree of flexibility to the Guilds feature.

On top of allowing settings to be changed at any time, Guilds privacy settings will soon be a lot easier to use and understand. Instead of today's settings where there exists that single, expandable privacy choice, we've sliced each choice a Guild creator makes — who can view, who can join and who can send invites, as well as member moderation — into separate options:



This change allows Guild creators and administrators to create a Guild that anyone can see but only invited people can join, or an invite-only Guild where members still have to be approved. These, along with some others, are configurations that aren't available today.

These changes should make the Guilds feature much more useful and flexible. And stay tuned: There's more to come!