unable to post from laptop

[SecretNutellaFix]

Hi Julie,
There appear to be a lot of us unable to post from or laptops and computers. We are all getting the message

Sorry we are not accepting new threads right now.

Can you help us out?

Yes, there is always the 'off' switch

It was a shame to leave some upset, vulnerable people without the support they had clearly come on here for.

OK, we're going to head off to look at our inbox and deal with some reports but will check back in later.

Hope 2014 brings you all whatever you wish for.

Give julie our love won't you. I think she will need it.

Just caught up with this after going to bed thinking I'd been suspended over nothing. Glad it's not the case.

Happy new year everyone.

Ive been here over 6 years under many different guises but I really dont give a fuck tbh. A newish mod made a mistake and probably feels like shit as this is her job and wants to do the right thing as we all do. I expect its very daunting running a large site like this and pleasing everyone

Yes, annie, and thinking of all those times posters have said 'really tricky your job, innit - looks nice but really tough trying to decide who is being goady and who isn't sort of thing'. Sometimes that can be tricky in RL, never mind when all you have is the 'words on a screen'.

So a big fat bunch of these to JulieJingleBells and see you back on your sleigh soon.

Happy NewYear

Seems like Julie was hung out to dry by her colleagues. Nice.

Doesn't look like that at all Ubik. It looks like decisions were made in error and the swiss cheese theory (when all the holes appear in line) happened.

I do wonder sometimes if people can't just be a little empathetic...

I was once in a rock or hard place decision at work - I was 'new' to the post but I certainly was not inexperienced or incompetent but being 'new' and the banding that I was I didn't have certain 'priviledges' I needed to prevent a huge issue happening.

In the end I made the ONLY decision I could make to keep people safe but that had implications, which I was hauled over the coals for... Despite having saved them a LOT of money and crucially kept people safe.

I think MNHQ need to be a little careful here - if I am wrong and Julie had full administrator rights to this board last night AND an escalation procedure AND a senior to contact and failed to do ALL of that then she is clearly needs further training and support.

However if MNHQ left Julie in charge with half the privileges in place, no senior in place and no escalation plans then quite frankly the people above Julie should be squirming uncomfortably and not deflecting it down to her. It is those people who are at fault and the lack of procedure not Julie and they owe Julie an apology.

If Julie was left in that second scenario (the fact she couldn't even shut down the board effectively says it is) she did RIGHT to shut down the board as some of the threads were, jokey or not controvened the Equality Act and therefore illegal and Julie as admin accountable. I imagine she was being absolutely bombarded with reports and inflammatory posts to be removed.

I felt sorry for Julie last night. I hope MMHQ look at their procedures so to protect and support their staff better

I was pissed off with Julie last night but having slept on it, I was wrong. She warned people and they thought they were bigger and better and carried on, so we all suffered.

[flower] Sorry Julie, hope you're ok today.

I feel sorry for JulieMN. We have all made decisions in our jobs that have turned out to be wrong in hindsight. But we didn't incur the wrath of thousands in writing on a forum.

I think we need to move on.......

Bloody hell we all fuck up sometimes. This is a great forum and can be a great support for people, no question about that, but it's not infallible nor are the people who run it.

I made a massive cock up at work once and I was devastated by it. Fortunately my boss backed me up to the hilt, helped me sort it out and stood up for me and I REALLY hope that MNHQ do the same for Julie and learn from THEIR mistake of leaving her on her on her own last night. The personal attacks on her are unnecessary and unkind. Like i said, it was a cock up but hardly the end of the world.

I think there had to be an element of personal responsibility from those posters DELIBERATELY making life difficult for the mods last night. They knew what they were doing and the increase in number of inflammatory posts across the evening demonstrates that. Even if it was for fun, and I'm not saying some of them weren't funny, it got to the point where it was filling up active with bullshit and needed controlling. Especially if people were offended, which they clearly were.

Maybe Julie made a different choice to what others might of made but look at what actually happened here - some people couldn't post to a forum. I would hate to think she is going to hauled in for that.

Was it annoying? Yes. Inconvenient? Yes. Some kind of NYE disaster? Not at all. Have some prospective!

I also think that while we all pay indirectly through advertising, this is a free to use site, which brings huge benefits to many of us, so I try and appreciate that rather than feel pissed off when things aren't going
as I would like them.

Whatever Julie did last night, someone would have found an issue with it and it would have snowballed with others agreeing.

Chin up Julie, I make lots of decisions at work that make me unpopular and sometimes I make the wrong call. But for me only 10 of them rolling their eyes and informing me exactly what I should do.

My job used to involve making similar judgements and publicly my boss would back me - even if privately I git my backside kicked.

I don't think it's right to comment publicly on the actions of mods.

I don't like that Julie's peers are openly criticising her either. Training needed all round maybe?

Things were heated because we were talking to people who needed help, then poof.

I wasn't involved in the jokey threads, but I saw them.
Then I saw the Julie's thread in chat - so wrong forum. Her tone was questionable.
Most of the people gravitated over to there and thus the jokey ones were stopped. If any more were made after this, that's because the warning was posted in the wrong area and was missed.
Few of us stuck up for Julie, said c'mon lets lay off her it's new years eve..
Then poof, no-one can post. People wondering if they'd been banned, people trying to 'fix' their laptops.. Then people realised they could use the mobile site.
An hour later Julie posting saying she'd taken the decision to block posts until the morning.
No warning of that, completely out of the blue.
People who needed help couldn't get it, I had PM's telling me they couldn't post at all and were confused and worried, another had a user texting them in tears because they needed help. We had been talking to a woman talking about killing herself, we were talking to people who had just lost their loved ones. Like I've said a few times, one of the highest suicide stat nights.
Not all people have access to mobile site.
Julie edited her posts to make them seem less abrasive, hours after.

The wrong decision was made, Julie obviously felt overwhelmed and I don't blame her for that at all, but that doesn't mean the wrong decision wasn't made. Remember when the trolls came? Was it shut down then? Nope. And rightly so.

Hopefully everyone can learn from it to prevent anything like this happening again.

I'm just catching up on this whole car crash after my first NYE without the kids in almost a decade.

I feel for HQ. I suspect folk'll been having a go no matter how they dealt with last night.

Not so much herding cats but herding tigers.

While Julie definitely made the wrong call and some really bad decisions last night I do hope she's ok and that the powers that be take responsibility for putting her in that position and give proper support.

Fwiw I don't think the other staffers have been disloyal. I think they've been honest and that's important on MN. We all fuck up from time to time but our audience is usually much, much smaller. However, it's important to acknowledge the truth of the situation to avoid being insincere or minimising legitimate concerns from site users.

In a few weeks jokes about pulling the plug and locking the site if we don't behave will become normal banter.

weeks? I predict hours!

Well I think the tranquilising happened after quite a few warnings Skully.

It may have been ott but it didn't come out of the blue.

There were no warnings on the threads.

Generally when a HQer come on and says cool it, it's getting silly then mostly they do die down.

There were no warnings. There was a thread saying the topics would be deleted and users banned. Most people who had been posting were busy commenting in their when suddenly no-one could post on the site.