Morning everyone,
Thanks for all the points you've raised here. We're going to have to eat humble pie here and admit we got things wrong here.
We rarely use "full of troll hunting" as a deletion message reason, and we can see why it might be a bit confusing, although troll hunting is still definitely against our guidelines.
Unfortunately on this occasion, it turned about that the OP in question was a troll, though we didn't know this at the time of the first thread- sometimes it can take a while for it to become apparent, and us to be sure.
We know it must be frustrating for folks who are certain they're onto a troll, but unless we're very confident that someone is a troll, we don't like to ban people. The last thing we'd want is for someone with a genuine problem to be booted off Mumsnet. The best thing you can do if you're unsure about a poster is report and then ignore the thread. If they turn out to be a troll, you're giving them exactly what they crave by posting.
Even when threads seems too ridiculous to be true, things are rarely that clear cut. We've know long time posters going through tremendously difficult circumstances, which on paper could sounds like an obvious troll, but we're confident that they're not.
In regards to the "other thread", we simply didn't see the reports til this morning, when we quickly zapped it. We understand this is hardly ideal, but we'd like to reassure people that it wasn't a case of us leaving a horrible thread to stand.
We're in the final stages of sorting out the volunteer overnight mods, and it shouldn't be too long before they're up and running. Hopefully this will help keep the late night nonsense to a minimum.