MNHQ do your advertisers know what happens here at night? Not very advertiser-friendly is it? The tabloids will be picking this up one day.

I can’t work out why these people do it for free? I mean I’m grateful they do I suppose, given that Mumsnet can’t be arsed to pay a proper wage, but I wouldn’t work for free

Nightwatch should take a stand and refuse to work for free.
Justine runs a multimillion £ company but is too tight to pay for proper moderation. Doesn’t want it eating into her profit margin.

If this troll wasn't so annoying I'd give them a job as moderator as they know how to play/bend the system,

If this troll wasn't so annoying I'd give them a job as moderator as they know how to play/bend the system,

If the rationale for keeping new registration open at night is that people may arrive desperate and in need of help, okay. But what's the rationale for exposing people who are desperate and in need of help to an unmoderated space vulnerable to misogynistic attacks?

I think Mumsnet needs to take on the responsibilities of a crisis space if it is going to present itself as a crisis space. Having a moderator on the job seems pretty minimal. Without that, might people not be better off somewhere else?

They need to hire a white hat hacker to make sure everything is secure, and get a paid mod on at night. Even just one would make quite a difference, I'm sure.

I think the ability to name change is important for privacy reasons, especially after various data leaks and some very public 'outings' of certain posters over the years. But I do think there should be limits on how frequently you can name change and/or how many names you can have in total.

For example, MNHQ should definitely limit the ability or frequency for one account to name change if they've only ever created one thread under each name then immediately moved on to a different name. Especially if they rarely or never engage in anyone else's threads and don't bother to respond to comments on their own.

If you've come onto MN to start a thread about some major moral dilemma or problem or outrageous scenario going on in your life that stimulates so much discussion that it can run to 30 pages of debate, what are the chances that you have so little interest in that debate that you barely come back to engage with it, bar the odd one or two sentence responses within 15 mins of the thread being started? I mean come on now. Let's use our brains here.

When I sniff these threads out (which is easy because they follow a formula and there are classic tell-tale signs) I always do a search on the name and it's always a first time poster. Even the user names and the time of day the threads are posted are often giveaways. Then I wait to see if they bother to engage much in their own thread. Then I'll check again a week or two later to see if they've posted anything else or joined in on any other threads.

Blocking first time posters from name changing after only one thread would help. Maybe don't let people name change for the first three months, or only after they've hit a certain word count by engaging with other people's threads. It's not bulletproof but it would at least cut down the frequency of the spammy AI generated crap.

It would not be difficult at all for MN to put this in place. Given that 'trolling' (ie repeatedly lying or misleading) is a banning offence, then if they don't do this, you have to start asking yourself why not. And who is motivated to do it.

That appears to be my post you are quoting. Very selectively. Why not reply to what I posted rather than pick one line of it and making it about something different ?

Do you agree or disagree with the premise of my whole post ? That the effectiveness of a preventative measure can be difficult to gauge for the end user ?

Cool.

Quote " ... without asking questions of Mumsnet..."

I am not saying that. I am suggesting it might take time.

I would see nothing in that hypothesis that would prevent Mumsnet from explaining whether attacks were more prevalent at night and explaining why moderation wasn't part of their toolkit to address that, if so. So if letting tech do their thing means the current state of non-communication, I disagree.

In the same way, if Mumsnet is dealing with some new and critical risk, positing the site in its unmoderated hours as a resource for desperate people in crisis is irresponsible.

So I agree with you that we don't know all of what is going on and cannot know to what extent moderation can solve things. These are fair points and useful to make on this thread. I don't agree that this justifies letting the techies do their stuff without asking questions of Mumsnet, in particular about levels of moderation on the site.

There is stuff in the news often enough about "foreign actors" setting out to cause disruption, so one never really knows. A teen in California or wumao department the PRC trying to force western sites to turn up their Cloudflare settings a few notches.

I think this is why it is important to let the techies do their stuff. Because it might be random individuals or an organized attack. And I think that should affect what long term action is taken. Because a security level put in place (such as geoblocking), might affect innocent users.

Would you agree with that ? Or disagree ?

Could be, but I think it's unlikely that there's only one spammer like this anyway, and this isn't the first series of nighttime attacks. And it's it's clear that his posts remain undeleted for a while at night, which is less likely to happen by day. Both Mumsnet's filters and its moderation have to fail for this to happen