Mailing Lists For Ning
So if I build a social network on Ning I can add forums which are kind of cool except that noone actually knows that new stuff has been posted and don't bother checking back in. It doesn't seem to matter what options you provide – RSS feeds, offers to email notifications of new threads etc – people drift away from forums very quickly once their question has been answered. On the other hand, mailing lists tend to be harder to get people to use in the first place because you have to subscribe, but then they tend to stick around longer because they've already subscribed. If in that time you manage to teach them a few things they didn't know they needed to know they hang around permanently and the community grows.
Coming back to Ning, it has lots of cool features and user management etc etc etc, but it doesn't seem to have any kind of mailing list at all. Ideally I'd like the forums to also have a mailing list option but if not, is it possible to just have a mailing list so people can join a group and they're automatically added to the mailing list? I can even host the mailing list software myself but it would need to be kept in sync.
It goes without saying that whatever solution I come up with would be clearly labelled as subscribing to a mailing list etc etc etc – it's not an attempt to fool people into opting into e-mail. All done in good faith and with all the nasty little details to be thought out in full before implementation, but right now I'm brainstorming.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:46 am
I know that it is possible to “Start Monitoring for New Discussions” on Ning’s forums (and a forum associated with a group). Not ideal but similar to what you are thinking about…
Another idea might be to have a PHP script on the server that runs regularly and uses their RSS to send out a daily summary.
May be there are some keen developers such as http://www.ningmods.com/ who could help integrate something.
January 17th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Email notifications of forum posts don’t work well, firstly because people tend to just sign up for notifications of responses to their particular problem and secondly because it still requires you to come back to the website to reply (and often to view the entire post). That just discourages people from replying to other posts.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Did you ever resolve this issue? I moved an internal group from Ning to Google Groups for exactly this reason, but would love to work w/ Ning in future.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Nope, just gave up on Ning and have had good success with a simple Mailman mailing list and Nabble to provide a web forum interface that’s tied to the list.
July 10th, 2009 at 1:58 am
I face the same problem. How exactly did you combine nabble and mailman? Would love to hear from your experience.
July 10th, 2009 at 6:47 am
Kris,
Just set up Mailman as normal and then create a new mailing list forum in Nabble and point it at the list. Nabble essentially just works as an archive but it also allows people to post.
July 16th, 2009 at 12:23 am
For the original question of connecting Ning to a mailing list, if you have your own server, you could run a script that logs into Ning with your admin credentials once per day or hour, downloads the members list and subscribes all new members to your mailing list. You’d have to get it programmed but a freelancer would be able to do it in a few hours if not less.