Regarding this latest news from Ning

[Michael Goebel]

No doubt, many of you have already heard about Nings latest executive decision to phase out their free networks.

From what we understand, services will be continuing, but only for those creators willing to pay the Premium site charges - $USD10 per month for the personal plan and $USD100 per month for the professional plan. Whilst, in the case of the personal plan, some might say What is the problem ? - it is ONLY $10 a month ?, it must be remembered that a great many site creators simply cannot afford this and work hard every month trying to assist those who are even worse off.

For those of us that have labored for months and some, for years, to build networks where everyone can come together and share, it is hard to imagine any worse news than this and this matter has become a major concern among a growing number of concerned site creators. For those with multiple sites, the situation is, of course, even more catastrophic.

Hearing that humanitarian sites such as Please Help Missing Children will be forced to shut down is particularly heartbreaking and herefore, a number of us here at the Collective have been discussing what we can do.

FOR SITE CREATORS:

The worst thing that could happen is that we all lose each others contact details. So before you do anything else, download your members details. Go to MANAGE>MEMBERS and down at the bottom of the page there will be a link to download your member data. Save it somewhere safe.

If you are one of those who will simply have no choice but to shut down their networks due to inability to pay the new charges, one of the most important matters will be to rescue material before the site is shut down - blogs, discussions, graphics, videos etc. It is strongly suggested that you get hold of a program that will download your site contents for offline viewing.

One program that accomplishes this is Offline Explorer Pro. We have tested it and it will successfully retrieve the entire contents of your network. Unfortunately, I cannot give you the link to it here as this document will then be tagged as spam and not get to you, but just do a search on Google and you will find it easily. Please contact me by direct email if you need help and I will do what I can to assist you - mgoebel(at)tpg.com.au

FOR EVERYONE:

A number of site creators here have graciously agreed to donate to keep the Collective running, so if you have a network and wish to keep it running, please join us here and you will at least have a home for yourself and your members. In view of the likely shutdown of many sites, we will be restructuring the Collective neighbourhood system over the next two weeks.

Whatever the name of your network was, please just make a group for it here and we will accomodate you and your members as best we can. There will not be any charges for membership here.

If we all stick together, we can get through this!

Love and Blessings,

All of us here at the Collective.