Ning News: Frame Busting Removed and Better Captcha (including audio)!

Premium Ning Networks currently paying for domain redirection, or future Plus and Premium Plans - - will no longer have the frame busting limitation imposed. Finally, you can add Ning Networks to an external web site, or a new page via an iframe tag.


The Ning platform has always prevented Ning Networks from being embedded in an iframe. In case you don't know, it's called "frame busting". So, anytime you attempted to add your Ning Network in an iframe, whether on your site in a page, or another website - - you would receive an error message/screen. This is a critical improvement for Social Media sites like Digg and Facebook, that embed sites within iframes. See more below.

Here are the details from Ning's Creator Site: New Captcha and Frame Busting Rules


What is an iframe?

If you don't know what an iframe is, here's the answer I gave to a member on the Creator's site:


In concept, think of an iframe as a text box. Within this iframe, you are pulling in an external website page. Example: Website A is pulling in an external web page (from Website B). The web page from Website B is displayed within the iframe, on Website A.

What is it? iframe is an HTML tag that enables displaying of external web pages.

What does it look like in my HTML? iframe use is:
Why would I use it? The iframe tag is used for several reasons, not just to frame an external web page. One of the reasons this is so important for our Networks, is like Evan mentioned in the
original article: the 3rd party Social Media sites like Stumble Upon, Facebook and Digg, use iframes to display websites. These type sites actually display the "digged/dugg" or the "stumbled upon" websites within an iframe. When this is encountered on a Ning site, it refreshes the visitor's screen and is confusing. And sometimes, it just breaks the page load, period. So, you are likely to lose that Visitor. And for the owner of the Ning Network, you receive the error message as in Evan's screen shot (shown below).
Now, this will not be an issue for premium Ning Networks.

Frame busting basically says, "You cannot display your Ning Network anywhere else." The removal of frame busting opens a lot of doors.

Here's a nice example:

You have a toolbar like Wibiya installed on your WordPress site. You would like to display your Ning Network from the toolbar. Before the improvement, we could not have done this. It would have busted the frame.

In the Wibiya case, you add a "Navigation Link". You could literally add your Ning Network URL as a link within this Wibiya app. And your WordPress site visitors could browse your Ning while on your WordPress site.

At the bottom of JenSocial, notice the bottom toolbar. All of the Editors you see are just links to other websites or apps. And within Wibiya those are technically in iframes. Even the movie link is being displayed in an iframe from another one of my servers. To elaborate a bit more: The "Editors" are being shown in an Overlay Window (Wibiya settings). Whereas, the Creator Groups (Ning Groups) are being shown in "Same Window". What this means is, "Same Window" is not an iframe. It just takes the visitor to a regular browser window or link. The Overlay Window uses an iframe, and doesn't leave your site.


Enjoy! This definitely opens up all kinds of new possibilities. As I develop nice iframe hacks, I will post them to our Ning Tips.


Best,
Jen