Please sort out moderation at night

I reported them to the Night Watch form, and had the troll taking the piss out of me on that thread.

I’m glad they’re showing this website up. No other website has these problems. It’s always being said by the mods ‘ooh but other websites have these issues’ but I don’t see it. Just Mumsnet. Again and again.

Tonight's is The Great Quail. I can't remember the name used last night but the style is so similar.

Tbh, I had assumed that it was a teenage boy. A group of immature boys egging each other on and thinking they're being so clever and so hilarious sounds about right.

Very tedious.

@cariadlet is it the same one? I stupidly engaged with them briefly last night and they told me it's a group of them who are 18, sitting smoking joints thinking it's funny that they are repeatedly getting past mumsnets filters.

Dickhead's back tonight. I've reported a couple of posts. Went to the other thread before coming in here and found that he's been spamming that one.

Well this is the question.

Cheap female labor??

Back in the day when the fields were green and Chomps were only 10p, MN was a very different place and people moderated for free, because everyone 'knew' each other.

This ain't the case now.

Can’t they block the IP address?

I was ill last night so on the site until about 3am and I must have reported at least 15 posts. I haven’t even had an email acknowledgment. What the hell is going on? How can there not be roles for paid moderators?

They couldn't create a new account with an existing user name.

Which given the nature of what the night watch volunteers were exposed to last yeah is absolutely baffling, and quite disgusting.

It exploiting the good nature of members expecting them to volunteer for that - when a site is new and people are helping out that’s one thing, but MN is a multimillion pound business

Not only is it ridiculous that there are no paid staff overnight, there also seems to be no way for the volunteer night moderators to get in touch with anyone at MNHQ if anything untoward happens during the evening / night.

The poor volunteers are just left with no support, and have to try and muddle through.

On another forum I use, huge but smaller than MN, there has to be moderators logged in otherwise nobody can create new threads. You also can’t sign up at night and you can’t create new threads after 10pm until you’ve created a certain number of other threads and posts (that number is changed occasionally to stop people deliberately posting to build their profile).

Given the salary bill for MN (stated by Justine when talking about Covid and furlough) it’s ridiculous that there is no rota of paid staff doing night time moderation (or someone paid specifically to work at night).

Yes they're blocked but they just make a new account. Its really not hard to get round being 'blocked'

The same user name was posting the same obscenity over and over, surely it's possible to block that username after the first report?

Why don’t they pay moderators?

The disgusting posts I saw were huge walls of text, repetitive, copied and pasted. Disruptive to genuine posters and those of us wanting to chat and blocking the threads.
A basic word limit - even if for new posters only, or during the night time unmoderated hours, would surely be simple to apply?
(We are all, rightly, subject to photos being checked and these appear after a brief delay so why not the same with big chunks of words)

They just make a new account immediately. All you need is a new email and a VPN or be in incognito mode. They probably have them already set up and just log in immediately

Nightwatch are all volunteers, and unfortunately they don't actually have many ways to deal with spam / serious incidents. It's mostly just the ability to hide posts.

Also, considering they're not paid there's no requirement for any of them to be online, so I'm sure there are many nights when there is zero moderation. The fact MN still relies on volunteers when the site is used by people all over the world is just ridiculous, especially as there have been numerous incidents that show just how important 24/7 moderation is for a site like MN.

I know some other forums and even Facebook pages that lock/close to posts at night until the morning when a mod comes online! Why can't we do that when we are at risk of being spammed?
People can still view the site and queue posts.

Surely this is the way. They have been on for multiple nights straight.

• Close registration at night
• Or only allow one post to be started ie. If someone is in trouble with unlimited commenting on that thread.
• Put restriction on number of comments elsewhere for a certain period ( say 24 hours). You earn nightly comment rights by being a normal poster for x number of days.

And I don’t think we can say but international users… if this is an international site then proper paid moderation should be 24/7.

I reported 2 of the obscene posts last night but didn't hear back. It was a poster who had already been deleted at least once on the same thread. Could they not have been blocked after the first offence?

How come the nightwatch can't close registration over night when the site is being spammed?

Tattle is much smaller than MN. So you can't compare the two.

Tattle membership and site traffic is tiny compared to Mumsnet. Mumsnet couldn't possibly operate the same way. I do agree they need full time paid staff overnight though. I cannot understand who would volunteer to do it, or why.