'Where Are They Now' if AIBU threads?

[MolyHolyGuacamole]

Do you even find yourself suddenly remembering a particular scenario, and wondering where the people involved are today, if the behaviour is still carrying on, did she ever LTB, etc?

Even if the thread had a resolution to the scenario, if things ever repeated again?

The one that came into my mind vividly today was about a woman who'd gone to collect her child (believe it was a DD) and came home to find that her husband had left the key in the door on the other side meaning they couldn't get in, and despite being able to see 'D'H in the window and signalling to him, he refused to come and open the door as he was on a work call? From memory they were left waiting for about an hour and DD had to wee in the garden.

I remember feeling so outraged for her, and find myself wondering now if it was just a one off or if the bastard has continued doing shitty things to them.

Any other ones that have left an impression?

[quote monotonousmum]@SecretKeeper1

I just read that whole thread and I was pretty sure on page 3ish that I knew what the flight seat was, and by extension the FLY space. But no one else said it so maybe I'm also a little crazy! [/quote]
Haha, don’t be going spoiling that confusing tangle of a tale with logic

I remember the OP who developed severe anxiety when pregnant to the extent she was going to terminate her pregnancy because she was so worried about FAS. Post after post about how she knew she’d harmed her baby because she’d had a drink before she found out she was pregnant (something like that).

She had the baby thankfully, but then came back when she was pregnant again and was considering terminating for a second time because she was anxious about something else that may have affected her baby. I wonder if she did have her second child. Think the name was ‘sleepless’ or something.

Y’all have been taken in by a hell of a lot of troll threads.

Having sadly never witnessed it myself, I'm really, really curious about how stories get "outed" as fake. Do OPs post enough identifiable names/locations/dates for readers to check? Aside from the properly outlandish takes, where would you even begin trying to disprove something?

@ DartmoorDoughnut @ MyFartWillGoOn

that was my thread . Not a troll @ Bollockstothat

It was my friend who wanted to take me and 2 other friends to a villa in Spain for a week as a thank you for support during a really tough time . One friend’s DH tried to muscle in and what was a lovely gesture by a lovely friend turned into a very stressful situation.

There are 2 threads from yonks ago that have stayed with me. One was a woman who had just moved in to a house with a swimming pool. Her new neighbours had had an arrangement with the previous owner that she could use the pool, and blithely assumed the arrangement was to continue! OP kept coming home to find neighbour in the pool, or she would come round the side gate, all sort of 'coo-eee, only me!' and start swimming!
Another one was posted by an OP who was deaf, as was her husband. They had a very young baby who they couldn't hear crying despite having some kind of vibrating baby monitor. It got to the point where the neighbours were shouting and screaming and ringing the doorbell at all hours, as the crying was hysterical as the OP and husband snored away.
I couldn't help feel sorry for her as she was clearly upset and looking for advice but my heart was breaking for the baby

@InPraiseOfBacchus

Having sadly never witnessed it myself, I'm really, really curious about how stories get "outed" as fake. Do OPs post enough identifiable names/locations/dates for readers to check? Aside from the properly outlandish takes, where would you even begin trying to disprove something?

Nope, you’re right - posters might report that they think it’s fake and then Mumsnet decides if it ‘seems’ fake to them. They don’t verify if it really is fake or not.

I know this because I posted in AIBU once and at some point I came back to the thread and mumsnet had replaced it with a message stating “thanks for your messages, we’ve removed this as it seems the poster is not quite who she says she is” or words to that effect.

No one contacted me to check any details about myself or the thread with me, they just decided off their own back it was fake but wrote about it like they were privvy to some additional information. If I’d read that I’d have assumed Mumsnet knew what they were talking about. Not the case!

It had been a real life situation and not anything especially ‘out there’.

(I was seeing my lodger and woke up in the night to hear him shagging someone in the room above me – I was furious & gutted and couldn’t sleep after that so got up and started working and posted on mumsnet what had happened. At the time I’d recently started working with a new freelance client and got my first payment so later on that morning took myself out shopping and for an expensive lunch while I decided what to do about limp dick upstairs. I think at some point the supportive thread turned and posters started picking apart what I’d eaten, etc., claiming I must be making it up.)

Now when I see threads have been taken down I take it with a pinch of salt – I know from my own experience there’s no investigation to establish something’s fake, it’s just second-guessed completely subjectively.

They can tell if the ip address has been used before under different accounts Usually stories don't make sense or there is NCing with glaring inconsistencies etc

@bruffin

They can tell if the ip address has been used before under different accounts Usually stories don't make sense or there is NCing with glaring inconsistencies etc

Might be the case sometimes, but definitely not the case with every post declared 'fake'.

But how often do threads actually get reinstated? I see the ‘we’re taking this down to have a look at things’ message and never see the thread again, so I take it to mean, we’ve deleted it.

I think there are a handful of people that shout troll. And derail the thread . People have lots if different situations and a handful of people decide it could not have happend. They twist everything the op says. It's pretty awful some people are going through hell and theses people making it harder for them to get support. The thread then gets deleted. And op is left with what?

Of course there are trolls but there always will be.

There was a woman relatively recently, within the last 6-8 months. The title was something like ‘when you have kids your life becomes a series of things you don’t want to do’. Her kids were relatively challenging - big age gap and one wasn’t neurotypical. But it transpired she had a massive DH issue. He had no input with the children, did nothing around the house, even went to his mothers house when OP was a few days post C section to get food for himself only, leaving her hungry. By the end of the thread she was saying she didn’t want to be with him but couldn’t see a way out. I can’t remember her name but I hope she is okay

I remember one of the first threads I read on Relationship boards when I went on maternity where OP was convinced her DH was having a affair with a famous woman who he knew from childhood
The thread went on forever , people trying to guess who it was & offer support
I stayed up until 3am reading the whole thing
I was gripped !
I accidentally lost the post when I removed it from the watch section

I often find myself wondering what happened next / who the celebrity was

Often trolls are proven because they e.g. have multiple accounts or they name change under the same account and don’t seem to think that MN HQ will know that.

I outed a troll on another website where I was a moderator, where a regular poster invented multiple different personas over the space of about 5 years. Each one would befriend a lot of people on the site, would have multiple disabilities and be suffering from depression. They would form close friendships with some people, and just as they were arranging to meet they would die, usually by suicide, leaving a lot of incredibly upset people behind.

Once they were dead there was obviously no more attention so they would invent a new persona and start again.

Part of our role as moderator was to check for clashes in IP addresses as it was against the site’s terms to have more than one account.

I spotted the IP clash between 2 accounts and watched it carefully, especially as one was in hospital and claimed to be posting from there but her IP changed from daytime (and a business address) to nighttime (which was a residential IP.

I watched it this closely because the original creator was very popular and wel known, so to out her as a troll would have caused a huge uproar and a lot of upset, not just within the online community but also within the visually impaired community.

Then I checked one last details. The site had a system where you could dial in and leave messages for people, and when I checked her phone number against her username the number came up with 4 other accounts. All of who had died apart from 1.

I banned them all, but the one continued on over twitter, and then 6 months later killed itself. I had actually started to doubt myself when it carried on for so long but in the end it killed itself and I knew for certain I was right.

She argued the toss, but she was 100% a troll. Without a shadow of a doubt.

Also, as much as there are genuine posters who might be accused of being trolls, there are almost certainly trolls who people believe are genuine.

I still remember the poster (Starssandstripes or something like that) who asked her dh to pop into a shop on the way home from work to get some milk. He went nuts about it, and gradually a whole litany of abuse unfolded.
Eventually, she left with her two children, and I sometimes wonder where she is now. I hope she's happy. It must have been 7-10 years ago???

Actually, maybe it wasn't that name, as I've just AS'd it and it seems to be someone else. Sorry, if so.

@messybun101

Remember the woman who asked others 'AIBU to ask what your vulva looks like' ... she was soon told yes, this is absolutely unreasonable to ask

MN is a magnet for perverts trying to get women to share stories about stuff they can get off to. This ranges from asking for descriptions of babies’ and toddlers’ genitalia under the guise of being worried about development to posting about teenage girls wanting to wear stockings or asking for ‘advice’ on giving BJs.

The naive earnestness with which posters eagerly respond to these threads is disappointing. If you ever try and suggest that perhaps it might not be the best idea to describe your kid’s genitals on a public forum with a total stranger, they get all aggrieved and either try to pretend it’s all fine or deny that perverts could possibly target MN.

@bruffin

They can tell if the ip address has been used before under different accounts Usually stories don't make sense or there is NCing with glaring inconsistencies etc

And there's a certain way troll threads go. Like "The Script" when a man is cheating.

@bruffin

They can tell if the ip address has been used before under different accounts Usually stories don't make sense or there is NCing with glaring inconsistencies etc

This isn’t the case any more because IP addresses are roaming so you don’t have the same one fixed to your device.

As someone who previously ran a forum, trolls are usually identified in a number of ways, mainly to do with subject matter, posting style etc. Once you have your eye in, so to speak, they’re easily spotted.

However, there are always outliers who manage to get away with it for longer. This is where it’s helpful to distinguish between troll types. You get the post and run twats who lob a contentious thread in then sit back and enjoy the frothing, but you also get people who create a whole alternate life online because they feel their real life is lacking somehow.

MN is a also well known platform for both women chatting about day to day stuff and one of the few places feminism is discussed so MRAs and TRAs target it. Pistonheads, for example, has members who are MRAs and have trolled MN for fun.

My point is that trolls are not all of the same stripe and posters should be extremely wary of posting personal info.

@HeyDemonsItsYaGirl

But if no one is verifying their suspicions with any solid evidence, how do you know it’s not just circular confirmation bias?

I.e. there’s a belief that certain types of threads ‘seem’ like trolls, which is then its own justification for taking them down (whether they’re really troll threads or not), which then reinforces the original belief that any thread with X characteristic must be a troll thread.

I had a thread removed in the past with a confident message left in its place stating that the thread wasn’t genuine – but that was incorrect – I was a genuine person with a real life situation, and the thread had been removed based simply on a ‘hunch’.

@trixie1602

I remember one of the first threads I read on Relationship boards when I went on maternity where OP was convinced her DH was having a affair with a famous woman who he knew from childhood The thread went on forever , people trying to guess who it was & offer support I stayed up until 3am reading the whole thing I was gripped ! I accidentally lost the post when I removed it from the watch section

I often find myself wondering what happened next / who the celebrity was

I remember that one Trixie!

Can confirm that the woman who got it together with the gardener ("Green eyed Gardener") was the same poster who "found" 10K in the hedge

No! I literally just came back to this thread to see if anyone had found my favourite gardener thread...is this the one where she was glimpsing him shyly through the window and they went to the pub on a date??

It was my fave feel-good, gardening-related thread

I always found BertrandRussell to be a bit of a douche tbh

Don't think that's in the spirit of the thread tbh.

@Biscoffbiscou from the hints & clues she was giving , I thought it was nigella lawson

I'd love to know how OP is getting on. She seemed so strong in a shitty situation