Justine's post: Hi again... Wow so this took off overnight! It's pretty clear from the strength of feeling and reaction to my post that this isn't so much about the actual affects of moving the Sex topic into Active, or the fact that individually you can avoid seeing it by hiding it, it's as much about tone and feel of the site. As such it seems to me there's no point us waiting for the data and so we'll remove Sex from active shortly.
One of the issues that we've got is that Active is very much the home page of Mumsnet for many - and as ComeTheFckOnBridget says lots of other sites do this differently.
When we launched follow topics last month, many users asked for a way to see a feed of the latest threads from the topics they're following - we're working on that feature at the moment and it will be ready to launch soon and I think over time it could be that Active then evolves to become more of an index and less of a landing page. But we'll see how the introduction of feed goes and what the take up is like before thinking about any further changes.
One thing that's been useful about this discussion is that it's made it clear we should formalise our guidelines on how we moderate the Sex board. As we've said, we have not, over the years, had any particular issues with this board (wrt to pervs, sex pests etc) but I agree we could communicate some clearer boundaries with regard to safeguarding and expected behaviour, so thanks to all who've mentioned that - we'll get on to asap.
Something I want to put on record is that this decision to move Sex threads into Active conversations had absolutely zilch to do with the Smilemakers partnership. There was no pressure put on us to make this move and at no point in any thinking about this did Smilemakers come up. Over the years we've literally turned down millions of pounds from brands because we've categorically refused to engage in disingenuous marketing and/or take money from those brands which don't make parents' lives easier - I think we've shown that we're pretty good at resisting commercial pressure.
Thanks as ever for the feedback and good weekends to all Flowers