Hi again.
Sorry we've been strangers here today. We've had a lot going on on other parts of the site. But we have just had a good read of the thread and wanted to confirm a few things with tech.
So, firstly, apologies. It seems we had the wrong end of quite a long stick here. We actually don't have the capacity to prevent any one thread going in Active. Some whole topics are 'hidden' but that's something you can change yourself in your settings. When you join Mumsnet a few topics are hidden from appearing in your Active view. These are the SEN topics mainly, as some years ago the SEN Parents community asked as to do this as they were getting a lot of 'unwanted attention' from folk out to cause trouble basically. We felt that we had a bit of a duty of care to keep that space as safe as we could for them so some of those topics are 'hidden' when a member signs up. You can of course 'unhide' them and also you can add topics to this list, as you probably know, so they don't appear in active.
What we were talking about in terms of specific threads is that occasionally we take them out of 'trending'. And that's an editorial decision really. It doesn't happen often at all but if we think a thread, for whatever reason, doesn't necessarily need to come down, but does perhaps not need to be proudly displayed on our front page, we might make that decision. It could be a privacy issue, it could be a matter of taste, and yes, sometimes, it's because a thread looks like trouble and we want to calm things down a bit. It's one of the tools we use to moderate, but it really doesn't happen that often if we're honest.
Just to be clear, the Brexit threads aren't excluded from either Active or Trending. That's not something we would do. And we don't exclude threads from Trending simply for having lots of reports. Firstly, reports aren't what gets posts deleted; posts that break talk guidelines is what gets posts deleted. So we might have hundreds of reports on any given thread, but unless the posts broke talk guidelines we wouldn't be taking them down.
To answer the question about vexatious reporting, this doesn't happen often but we do occasionally have people who mass report on one topic and the posts simply aren't reportable. When that happens we would have a word with them about it and if it continued we might then take further action. But we'd want to be pretty sure it WAS vexatious first. We don't want to discourage people from reporting in case they get it wrong. But honestly, we aren't daft and it is pretty clear when someone is reporting simply to try and get a thread deleted.
So to answer the original question, nothing is excluded from Active. The Brexit threads we assume would sometimes show up there but it's all about what's being posted on at the time. It's not quite as simple as 'that thread is busy' so it must appear in Active. There are hundreds of threads, if not thousands, being posted on at any one time, so it's not really surprising if a thread doesn't appear in Active at any given moment.
Hope that clears everything up anyway. Do shout if any of that lengthy essay wasn't clear and apologies for any miscommunication.