Hello Terfing and others,
Thanks for the ideas. We do see your points and we are currently having a think about what we might be able to do to improve things on this front. We have had a chat about these specific ideas though.
We would be concerned that not allowing people to post in feminism for 30 days might a) seem a bit 'othering' for the feminism boards, which we think would be a shame. It could put people off posting there full stop, if they felt it was a bit of a 'club', IYSWWM? But b) we think it would just move the issue into Chat and AIBU where perhaps posters aren't quite as clued in on what's been going on and so any trolling would possibly have more of an impact.
With regards to the idea of a 'newbie badge', again, it's a good idea in theory and might help solve this issue on the feminism boards, but we think we'd end up with newbies being accused of trolling for anything more 'opinion-based' than asking for slow-cooker recipes. And even in feminism, actually, we think it might mean new posters felt their opinions were less valued than others.
One of the nice things about Mumsnet is that it's completely egalitarian and you can just join up and post. And the vast majority of people that do so are simply wanting to get breastfeeding advice in the middle of the night or ask for help with their child's homework. Although we know it's really irritating when trolls run amok on the feminism boards, they are a tiny, tiny proportion of the people that sign up to post immediately, so we think it would be a shame be forced into a policy change by those few troublemakers when that change would adversely affect all our new users.
We also should add that a post from a newbie that goes heavily against the grain on a thread might seem like goadiness or trolling at first glance, but we'd want to see a strong pattern there before we zapped anyone for that. We think labelling folk as 'new' might make it harder for someone who is perfectly genuine but simply disagrees to join up and air their opinion, and we firmly believe that free speech cuts both ways.
So, in summary, at the moment we think the negatives of either of those policies would outweigh the positives. We will keep talking about it here though, and see if we can come up with other any ways to improve the situation. Please do continue to jot your ideas down here - we are reading them all and making notes.