[paulbaumgart]

Do they have an agreement with Ning? Otherwise... how do you scrape Ning at scale without them figuring it out and blocking your IP addresses? Tor?

[Raphael]

Ning gets tons of traffic. It would be awfully cruel to clamp down on a little harmless scraping.

[paulbaumgart]

Making it harder to move your data might encourage more people to upgrade to the premium version.

It wouldn't be very nice, though. I agree.

[protomyth]

people will do an amazing amount of work when they feel like they are held hostage. People tend not to make the value decision like a company would.