Evening all,
We're a bit gutted by some of the posts on this thread, so think perhaps we should do some explaining. The last thing we want to do is rake over the mud but since certain things have been raised and some of you have expressed disappointment in the way we've acted, we thought we should explain ourselves - plus we would hate some of the misconceptions appearing here to pass into folklore.
With regard to Aloha, we are like many of you really sad she chose to leave Mumsnet and we do hope she'll be back one day. On a particularly contentious thread, we deleted two of her posts which broke our rules on abuse. We drew a distinction between clear personal attacks eg "Piss off you twat" and the more discursive "some of Aloha's posts in my opinion are racist". You may disagree with that distinction but it's probably one we'd draw again.
It hadn't crossed our minds that later readers might (wrongly) interpret that the posts we deleted were in fact, racist. This undoubtedly was an oversight and we apologise for that. It was actually entirely my fault as I was the one on duty at the time (if I said I'd just gone into labour would it count in my defence? 
). But when this was later brought to our attention we did everything we could to dispell that misconception and deleted the thread immediately - am a bit bemused that it can still be accessed, we'll look into that asap.
Re the Pie thing, for those of you who are interested and weren't around at the time, this was a tricky one for us but we don't believe we acted unfairly. Pie was again a much-valued mumsnetter who was in charge of swaps on Mumsnet. A while after we found out Pie had set up her own site for mums, we (very politely as it happens - wrote it meself) asked Pie to stop running the swaps in which she had access to Mumsnetters addresses on Mumsnet. To be honest we had assumed she would stop herself once she started a website along the same lines as Mumsnet, as she could obviously run them on her own site - which indeed she does.
There was no question of banning her and all our correspondence was extremely civil - we copied most of our mails (save the last one which went along the lines of "sorry it got so heated, no hard feelings") into the threads regarding this by way of explanation to Mumsnetters at the time - do look them up if you're interested.
Having said all that we certainly do not claim to be infallible and we certainly make our share of mistakes. We are trying to be as fair as we can and in general we think the fairest thing we can do is have a few rules (as few as possible to keep Mumsnet going and civil) and adhere to them as closely as we can, so everyone knows where they are.
We do try our best to listen to you and to admit our mistakes and learn from them - \link{http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk?topicid=1374&threadid=101762&stamp=050827154935\Milupagate} we hope, was a decent example of that.
Peace and love,
MNHQ