You want to keep your social network fun, safe, and on topic, and to do so, you need to let the right members in, and keep the foul members out. A great way to ensure that only legitimate and desired members join is to take advantage of the following:
- Sign-up quiz and CAPTCHA: Adding a quiz to the sign-up process for your Ning Network makes it difficult for spammers to join since they will need to take the time to research the answer. Alternatively, you may only want members who know a specific code or phrase that you’ve shared with them (via a separate email subpscription, for example) to be able to sign up.
- Email verification: You can enable email verification on your Ning Network for all new members to help ensure that only those with legitimate email addresses make it through.
- Member moderation: With member moderation turned on, you’ll be notified when new members wish to join your social network, and you get to approve their membership before they can sign in and do any sort of activity.
- Network Administrators: By promoting trusted members to Administrators, you can get help from others. By appointing members to Admins, you’re giving them many of the privileges you have, with a few important exceptions. They cannot update network information, take your social network online or offline, update or remove your pricing plan, or access Analytics and Advanced Options. You can also provide members with administrative tools to help manage your Ning Network, without giving them full access to all administrative features by creating specific roles.
- Network privacy options: By making a social network private and invite only, you can start with the right members and keep that going. This works especially nicely if member moderation is on, since only those that are invited can apply to join, and only those you approve are accepted as members.