Just to spell it out: we would never discriminate against, or fail to value, one group of MNers on the basis of their notional lack of appeal to advertisers.

Obviously there are posters here who feel that their perspectives have not been valued, and for that to have happened we must have fallen down at some point. But whatever the explanation is, it's not about money or commercial reach.

Actually, I don't 'think' that would go - I know it would go.

Yes, that's ugly. I can't say (obviously) what was going through the poster's head when she wrote that. I can imagine that some people almost literally only 'see' the wheelchair, and so refer to that rather than to its owner. But if we thought someone was deliberately and persistently referring to wheelchair users as 'wheelchairs', I think that would go.

I think (and I'm not the expert on this) there are two elements to our treatment of McCann postings. The first is that the situation they're in is unimaginably terrible to most of us, and we think speculation about their possible involvement is simply beyond the pale. The second is that quite a lot of what gets posted about them is libellous, and we will always delete potentially libellous posts when they're reported.

The thing is, if someone were to start a thread about (to grab an example) why the Black Police Association exists, we would absolutely let it stand. Or if someone were to start a thread questioning the need for taxpayers' money to be spent on furthering equal opportunities for BME groups.

What we would delete is a thread saying 'should BME people be allowed to use public transport?' - and we would delete that thread if you substituted 'people with SN' for 'BME people'.

I think the grey area here, as some have pointed out, is whether it's disablist to express the view that facilities designed for (for example) wheelchair users might not always exclusively be accessed by wheelchair users.

Yes, this may well be true - and this is an issue we've encountered on other boards as well (for example, definitions of 'sexism' in FWR, and definitions of 'rape apology/rape myth' after we began the We Believe You campaign).

We believe in light touch moderation, because we think it makes for the best discussions. But every so often that butts up against some MNers' (understandable) wish for more moderation in a particular area - often because, as someone (sorry) has said here, because they have an entirely understandable wish for Mumsnet to be a safe space.

As ever, we are ready and willing to listen to what you all think; I'm sure nobody at MNHQ is going to claim that we have nothing to learn here.

We're sorry to disappoint - genuinely.

But, yes - we think that, on balance, it's better to allow people to air a genuine misconception (in this case, broadly speaking, that in some circumstances it might be OK for a pram to take a wheelchair space), for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it allows other posters (by no means exclusively posters from the SN boards) to put them right. Secondly, we believe that hosting these debates (always with the caveat that they remain reasonably civil) does an awful lot to inform the opinions and attitudes of those who do not deal with disability issues on a daily basis. Over the years, we've seen countless posts by MNers that show how far our members are informed by the experience of reading these threads.

Can you give us an example of the kind of thing you mean, Celstial? Our Guidelines say that we will delete disablist posts, and (as a team) that's what we strive to do. We're extremely sorry if that's not the way it seems to some of you.

Hello,

We've just posted this on the other Site Stuff thread, but thought it might be worth putting here too:

First off, we're very sorry to see that what's happened over the past couple of days has upset some of you. We at MNHQ are immensely proud of the SN boards, and of the incredible advice and support that the posters on there offer each other. (I've held meetings with some disability rights organisations/lobbying groups, and they've been open-mouthed at the quality of the postings on those boards; one of them told me that it was as good, if not better than, the advice offered by their paid phone-staffers.)

We'd hope that this goes without saying, but just in case it doesn't: we take disablism seriously, and we will delete it when it's reported to us. We also appreciate that those caring for other people with SN (or those with SN themselves) don't need any unnecessary hassle in their lives, and we try to take that into account when we consider reported posts.

All that said, we think Mumsnet is a place where people without much experience of SN should be able to explore issues around this topic (as with almost any other topic). There's a big difference between someone rocking up and posting abuse about those with SN (which would be deleted), and someone posting a genuine query about the ethics and etiquette of a situation like that described in the original thread. Those of us who've been around for a while have seen these issues rehashed time and again, but we need to bear in mind that every week we have many new members for whom these are not familiar arguments.

The original thread seemed to us at MNHQ to be a genuine query posted by someone whom we have no reason whatever to be suspicious of. The second thread was started when the first maxed out at 1000 posts; again, we think that it's not unusual, in MN terms, for follow-up threads to be started in these situations - so the second one did not seem to us to be an unreasonably bitchy thread-about-a-thread (ie the kind of thread we'd delete), nor did it seem to be unnecessarily goading.

We have been through both of those threads and deleted anything we thought to be a beyond-the-pale personal attack (if you think we've missed any, do please report them). I think I'm right in saying that we did not spot any posts that seemed to us to be disablist; but again, PLEASE report them if you think we've missed some and we will consider them carefully.

The third thread came to our notice some time after it was started; this is our bad, and we're sorry about this. Some days are heavier than others in terms of reported posts, and today was one of those days. When we got around to the reports of it, we thought that its wording - unlike those of the first two threads - was very likely to inflame the situation, and so it was deleted. This was also our reasoning with 2Shoes's subsequent thread.