Why was a post deleted?

[Needtofiddle]

So many of the ones I am on are deleted at the moment. It is quite disheartening. This one was about washing waterproof trousers! It was in housekeeping and only had 10 replies. Mine were two of them. Can I ask why it was deleted?

Quite a few trolly types have been invading Housekeeping recently. Prob one of them (there was a coffee maker plugger for eg)

I came to site stuff to ask what was going on in Housekeeping at the moment - I've been on a few that have been deleted -and the last time I'd read them they were the normal stuff - nothing spammy ...or apparently trolly.

Something about a dusty radiator and something else about a burnt saucepan...and a dehumidifier - weird...
(And I have been sent a pm that I have no idea what it is about and doing advanced search didn't bring anything up -but then I have just read the thread about search not working...)

Hi there, Needtofiddle.

Sorry about that - we know it's really annoying when threads vanish. In this particular case it was started by a spammer (they were basically advertising their product) and we've had rather a spate of this at the moment. We do delete spam posts wherever we see them. If we didn't we'd quickly be drowning in spam threads to be honest so we do have to keep on top of it. We only delete whole threads though if it looks like the original poster was the one spamming, or if the whole thread has been ruined by spamming and would be better off just lost. If it's just one or two posts we try to just delete them and let the thread continue.

Hope that explains it all a bit.

There's at least another five threads started by spammers in Housekeeping this evening. I've been busy pressing the report button again.

They are quite easy to spot. They post an innocent sounding question, then the next post or the one after will have a link to a product that will solve all the first poster's problems in one easy purchase.

I wish the mumsnet software could be set up so that when you're posting a link (it might be that you try to be helpful but have no other second thoughts about it) the mumsnet software would throw a pop-up saying "You're about to post one or more links. This might not be in line with the mumsnet guidelines. Are you sure you want to continue?" This would be very helpful. Then you can abort if it was a thoughtless error. It's a bit like having a handrail on the stairs in a stairwell, without the handrail it's easy to slip and step into thin air, falling down in the middle of the stairwell (=having your account suspended). With the handrail (=software checking whether there are links included) it'll never happen.

random

Bit ironic when the site is currently trialling adding links without any intent from the poster though