We use to be on Ning. Ning did the dirty on us and decided to kick out the smaller non-paying sites. That was a huge event. After a lot of research I took the site over to Grouply based on their sympathy and promises they wouldn't treat us the way Ning had. The also had a system to transfer all the data over to make it easy. It wasn't a totally clean transfer, some of the info ended up in strange places, but at least it was done. We set up and settled in. Our numbers grew, quite slowly but surely.
Then Grouply told us that Oodle was buying Grouply. They were 'very excited'. I bet they were. They probably got a packet for the sale. From the:
Grouply / Oodle FAQ
"How will the acquisition affect existing Grouply Groups and users? Can we continue to create new groups?
There will be no changes. Existing Grouply social groups will continue to operate and be supported as before, and you are welcome and encouraged to create new Grouply social groups at www.grouply.com/create."
Yeah. I got an email from one of my member saying they thought the site had been deleted. !!!
The message where my site was:
"We regret to inform you that as of February 24, 2012, the Grouply service and all individual group websites built on the Grouply platform are no longer available.
When Oodle acquired Grouply in November 2010, the intent was to leverage the Grouply code base to add a community layer to the Oodle Marketplace while continuing to run Grouply as a standalone service. While the integration of Grouply with Oodle was successful, unfortunately, the economics are such that we can no longer justify supporting the Grouply service on its own.
If you are the creator or administrator of a Grouply group, you can request a copy of your group member list and select group data here."
Then you follow the link, put in the address of your site and get:
"An email has just been sent to the email addresses on file for the administrators of the group "kablemob.grouply.com/" with information on how to retrieve the group's member list. You will be able to retrieve additional group data (e.g., photos and files) by March 9, 2012. Please return to www.grouply.com at a later date to request this data."
The email didn't have any information about how to retieve the data, the member list was an attachment and that is all. The data is gone and their was no real warning.
No one is answering email or Tweets or FB posts. It's just gone. Even Ning didn't do that to us, they gave us about 3 months warning.
Personally I wouldn't go near Oodle with a pole (unless I could hit Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle, with it), and Craig, you've made 163 enemies. Very chatty enemies.
No one is answering email or Tweets or FB posts. It's just gone. Even Ning didn't do that to us, they gave us about 3 months warning.
Personally I wouldn't go near Oodle with a pole (unless I could hit Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle, with it), and Craig, you've made 163 enemies. Very chatty enemies.
