Calling all night owls!

[RebeccaMumsnet]

Hi all,

We'd like to recruit some more of you into the Nightwatch, to help out alongside our current night time volunteers.

The Nightwatch are a group of MNetters, many from overseas, who have the power to hide posts or threads of a spammy nature, or posts that overtly break our Talk guidelines.

They can't see or respond to reports, and aren't asked to make judgment calls on stuff like personal attacks, bunfights, troll-hunting and so on; they're simply equipped to deal with the sort of beyond-the-pale posts or images that you - and they! - would normally report to us.

Night watchers don't have to identify themselves, and are under no obligation to be around full-time - it's more a question of popping on the boards as you would do in the course of a normal day's Mumsnetting. We will be drawing up a rota and asking what works for you and what doesn't; if you thought you were likely to be around one night a week, that'd be about perfect.

If you're interested, please post below and we'll mail you with further information. We are looking for a handful of people, and will be looking at the global timezones to help cover as much time as possible, so please don't take it personally if you're not selected: it doesn't mean we love you any less

I cannot understand why someone would volunteer to work for nothing for a large company. Would you work for McDonalds for zero pay?

It is embarrassing that a company like Mumsnet expects people to work for nothing.

That's tight!! You should have paid staff!!!

Yes these should be paid roles, totally unethical to get volunteers for this.

I am also surprised that such a big company is asking for volunteers to run its out of hours services.

I think it would be wonderful if MNHQ said 'you know what, I bet we could give a few people - maybe women who would otherwise find juggling work and childcare impossible - a really great job here. Let's pay them a fair wage for the responsibility of looking after the site at night.

Agree. Totally not on. Have been complaining about how you treat posters with mental health issues for years (having received a suicide nite from someone on here) and now this after the thread the other night?

Could barely see the board for Cadburys adverts the other day (hence the name) and you want to put something so important in the hands of volunteers? Don't wait for an accident to happen.

And haven't I seen campaigns on here against unpaid student internships?

I am happy to do this

I'm up for it. I'm in the UK but work a different timezone part of the time which I can never reset myself from. (And I MN when I'm working anyway )

Do I get a badge or a walkie talkie?
I think MN is quite enormous now though and so many different personalities, that the people who write 'special snowflake' in their posts might snowflake out and delete/hide things that they shouldn't be, really. Will volunteers be trained & up to speed on libel law & art 10 & what constitutes assault etc?

what about suicidal posters, etc?
you definitely need to provide some training even if online & brief

overcomplicates
will work for biscuits

the people who write 'special snowflake' in their posts might snowflake out and delete/hide things that they shouldn't be, really.

What do you mean leg? That people who say 'special snowflake' are wrong for the job? That's encouraging, I've never ever said it

Will volunteers be trained & up to speed on libel law & art 10 & what constitutes assault etc?

But that's not the role, is it? The NW role is just to hide the 'no question about it, it's over the line' stuff for MNHQ to review later and leave the other stuff.

(And journalists are taught media law in about 10 minutes flat, which includes libel law and everything else.) It'll be fine. There are already NightWatchers doing it without a problem, just not enough of them

you definitely need to provide some training even if online & brief

current Nightwatcher here

We do get exactly that - online, brief guidelines on what how to deal with difficult mental health posts.

I would bloody love to have some power around here. And, I'm in Canada so could do it. However, considering the desperate, awful financial states some people on here are in, wouldn't it be better to pay someone? It's a flexible, work from home job. They are like hen's teeth.

Please consider paid staff MNHQ.

I would bloody love to have some power around here.

I'm hoping the rejectees will at least get secret, special edition emojis.

This should be a paid role. With proper access to reports and stuff.

If that happens I'm up for it

Some people's interview techniques might need tweaking from:

MNHQ you are so tight and embarrassing. .can I have the job

Yes - I am in New Zealand.

I agree that this is embarrassing. Mumsnet is a huge company with responsibilities - this should be a paid role.

another one who says this should be a PAID role

who's running shit at the towers these days

Asking posters to become unpaid moderators can lead to trouble. Look what happened on Reddit a couple of years ago. Or worse, take a look at AOL when the moderators revolted and AOL were successfully sued for back pay.

Other tech companies claim to moderate via algorithms (this isn't strictly true), but is is part of moderation. Surely your tech can set up alerts to point you to threads with a high volume of reports? And you can pay a number of impartial humans (on a non-disclosure agreement) to moderate via alerting.

Be careful MNHQ, unpaid moderators can come with a high cost.

My first thought when I read this was why can't this be a paid job.

Thanks for your comments all, we are reading them through and thanks to those who have volunteered. We will look through everyone interested on Friday and let those who are successful know early next week.

We are one of the few site who do pay our moderators, we have a team who deal with reports.

The nightwatch are an extension to this.

They will ONLY deal with threads/posts that they get a auto generated mail about (the mail is sent if there is a high volume of reports about one thread/post). They have no data access, we do not ask them to make judgement calls. If they are online and get a mail from MN to say that a specific post has been reported several times, they can have a look and if it's blatant spam/trolling etc, they can hide it for us to review in the morning.

We do give basic info on how to deal with threads as and when they arise and we give a basic overview of what we are asking for when they start.

This is a no obligation role, we are asking that if they are online anyway, they help out by hiding things.

The volume of reports overnight is actually very low. For example, between midnight and 9am on an average Monday (figures based on average over a year) we get about 21 reports and between 9am and midnight we get 98 reports.

The difficulty is there is no exact science, we have many night with no reports and then we'll have an evening when we get a few hundred. We try our best to cover as much as we can, as quickly as we can.

Maybe the unpaid thing could work if they knew they could contact someone at MNHQ if things get out of hand. Would having someone from HQ 'on call' every night help? A paid position whereby they're available to take calls/emails from NW members. And how low is the threshold for reports? There was a thread recently that appears to have had loads of reports overnight yet nothing was done. Maybe the threshold needs to be set lower?

if you get so few reports, would it really kill you to pay maybe two people to job share and cover the night shift properly?