After three months experience with Ning, it's becoming clearer how we can best feel at home there without feeling confused or overwhelmed by the wealth of options and the quality of experiences, inspirations and thoughts available.

Be selective
Consider our Online Community like a city, with many monuments museums, neighborhoods and cafes. Find the places you like and stop by them. Find a couple of comfy corners to frequent and settle into the sofas there.
Nobody can know everyone… Continue

We have just learned that when someone leaves Ning, any discussions they started are deleted - and so are any replies that any other people have added, including any record even on your own home page.

This has already happened to us once when the Paganism and Pantheism discussion disappeared a few weeks ago.

This has some important implications:

1. Everyone should keep their own copies of wha

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You can search all of this World Pantheism community for anything you are interested in. I just added a new tab for this - top right.

Well it happened, in our fifth week at Ning. A girl called Esther joined, six hours ago, describing herself as a nice-looking girl. Her photo was a vase of flowers. As soon as she arrived she began leaving comments on male profile pages, asking to be friends, giving her email, saying she would send her picture. She did about ten guys, while she was here, sending the same message to each one. Five or six smelled spam instantly, one mailed me.
We don't really have any protection against this, exce… Continue

You can now hover on the groups Tab and see a menu item for local & regional groups!
Since Ning does not have an option to categorize groups, this had to be improvised. You just insert the word "local" somewhere early in the group description. The new link is basically a search page for the word "local" in all the groups.

Sharon is quite right when she says it's easy to start getting overwhelmed by all the activities.
An important way to reduce the noise here is to limit what emails you get sent. You can do that here.
Also you can choose to start or stop getting emails about any particular discussion by clicking "Follow" or "Stop following" at the bottom of the reply box.
It's also wise to find a niche of the most important places for… Continue

Potentially the chat facility here is great - at any time there are six or more members on line, and you can chat at any time. The biggest problem with the way it is now, is knowing that someone is trying to chat. There should be a window that pops up but there isn't. Here's a typical exchange of people trying valiantly to be heard, and failing. I hope they don't mind.

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