Neighbors for Neighbors

Do stuff with and for your neighbors

Seems to be a site-wide setting that you can't email people unless you're "friends" with them. That makes emailing people about stuff they post in the forums (like housing) next to impossible (sorry, I don't friend people I don't know!) or to communicate with group leaders.

Can someone please fix this?

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Brett,

This is default setting in the platform and I see how this presents a challenge.

Perhaps come up with a brett.jan1@gmail.com account you could post.

I'll pass this on to the folks at Ning. I do know the reason they do this is to prevent people from getting spammed.

Joseph
Thanks for the quick reply Joseph- I kinda figured that it was for spam purposes, but I think it's critical that it be enabled, even if there is a risk of spam.

I see a lot of people posting to the forums and saying "contact me if interested", on everything from selling things to leasing apartments to trying to find like-minded folks to hang out with, and more. They probably don't realize that it's impossible to do so, and that probably discourages them from coming back to NfN, much less participating again.

Can Ning set the default to allow email, but give people the option to be more private...with the appropriate disclaimer that they'll be impossible to contact, and this is a SOCIAL network? :-P Or implement captcha? I'm on Meetup, and by default, it allows people to email each other through the site. I have never received spam from Meetup via that mail-another-member function.

Brett
I'll pass this along. Point taken.
PS. Thanks for taking the time give this feedback.
One more thought.

About friending. It's a loose term and means different things on different networks.

Here I don't even think it's necessary. Since we all already have something in common - we're neighbors.

What it does do it protect people from the facebook experience of getting slammed with invited to a billion events all the time.

If we as a community defined what it "means" to be a friend - the ability to send messages. Would that make you feel comfortable friending people you don't know?
I think people should decide for themselves what it means to be 'friends' here, and also be encouraged to interact with people they haven't (yet) considered a friend, similar to your goals with the Nametag Project :)

That's not to say people shouldn't be encouraged to add each other as friends if that causes one to see what one's friends are doing on the NfN network (ie like a Facebook homepage.) But I think the carrot approach (reminding people about the feature, telling them what benefits it brings) might be best?

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

-B

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