Can you stop the Daily Mail doing stories about MN????

[Letmehaveausername]

I know it's great publicity, and I know it probably brings new users to the site and makes money etc.

But they are massively overstepping the mark making users so identifiable to whoever reads that trashy rag. MN is supposed to be anonymous, and there's a big difference between posting something on the forums you know is unlikely to ever be read by the people you know, and the daily mail advertising it to the wider world.

A lot of people post for advice, support and to get things off their chest; they don't post for a newspaper to make a mockery out of a support forum and that's exactly what they're doing.

You have to double check everything you say now in case they copy it, and change your username regularly to make sure anything they publish can't be linked back to you personally. It's ridiculous.

Nope you can't, MN is a public forum so anything you write on here is in the public domain. This is why people need to be more careful in what they put on here just in case the Daily Mail write an article on the post!

Letme, we’re sorry the current rash of threads being quoted in the DM is upsetting you. As many posters have pointed out, unfortunately there’s not a huge amount we can do about it - they'd likely claim Fair Use and that would be difficult to challenge. It’s one of the downsides of Mumsnet being an open site, and as always, we remind everyone that this is a public forum, searchable by Google, legally linkable to - and quotable by - all and sundry.

On the upside, this openness means volume of users and volume of users means Mumsnet is available for free to anyone who needs advice 24-7. It also means fresh faces, a variety of points of view, and the wisdom that comes from a very sizeable crowd (which, as an aside, tends to mean that wrong or misguided advice doesn't stand unchallenged).

Only you can decide whether the upsides outweigh the downsides; we hope you’ll stick with us, of course - and making use of the name-change facility with reasonable regularity (perhaps with only a small tweak) makes it a lot less likely that your anonymity will be compromised.