I’m excited to introduce Leaderboards for your Ning Network. Leaderboards are ordered rankings of the top members and content on your Network, and they’re powerful for two reasons:

• For Creators, Leaderboards make it easy to discover and promote the best of your Network.
• For members, Leaderboards spark friendly competition, establish reputation, and encourage deeper, more persistent engagement.

With today’s launch, you have the power to make use of Leaderboards in the perfect way for your Network. You can view the latest trends on your Network Dashboard, add Leaderboard pages to your top-level tabs, and even add a Leaderboard module to your Main Page. Details below!

For the launch of Ning Mini, Ning Plus, and Ning Pro coming up on July 20, we’ve been revisiting every limit that’s currently in place on your Ning Network today. And for each of these limits, we’ve been asking: Does it make sense?

We’ve shared many updates on our FAQ page in the past two months, but I wanted to dive in a little deeper here and explain why we’ll be removing limits that don’t make sense anymore and introducing a few additional limits that will ultimately improve the member experience.

Running a Ning Network is a lot like hosting an awesome party. But no matter how rocking it is, sometimes people leave and sometimes you have to kick people out. On Monday, we’ll be introducing more flexibility to the experience members have when they leave your Ning Network, and to the experience you have when you need to remove a member. These improvements will facilitate member management and keep the party going strong.

Along with launching our brand-new Ning Creators Network today, we’ve also updated the design and layout of Ning.com. As we first posted here, this is the first step of a redesigned Ning.com that will be focused on Ning Network discovery, Ning Network management and no default Ning-wide profiles.

We’ll have more on this update soon, so stay tuned. Thanks!

Earlier this week, we wrote about how you can use Ning Apps to add a store to your Ning Network. Ning Apps are also incredibly useful for driving donations and fundraising efforts. Hawks for Homeless is a Ning Networks that’s using a Ning App to help drive donations to the The Midnight Mission in Los Angeles:

Other Ning Networks like TuDiabetes and The Hoot Owl have launched similar fundraising efforts. Adding your own fundraising Ning App takes a few quick steps.

No one likes spam, especially us. It makes for a less-than-awesome Ning Network experience for members and makes a Network Creator’s life harder than it needs to be. While we’ve been building spam prevention into more and more elements of the Ning Platform, we’re constantly looking to drive more spam prevention projects that make Ning even better. Some of these projects are obvious and others are behind-the-scenes. Our ultimate goal is to eliminate spam on your Ning Network before it ever gets there.