[quote CoteDAzur]@JustineMumsnet Have you considered the possibility that someone in your IT team might be sabotaging the system from the inside?
The frequency and frankly shocking level of IT "mistakes" that have happened on here over the years makes me doubt the prevailing assumption that the incompetence of your technical staff is to blame, especially if you really have "12 full time developers" and spend "around £1m per annum on our Tech, product and data teams combined".[/quote]
Hi CoteD,
I'm completely sure no one is sabotaging us from the inside, yes. We have for sure had several nasty IT incidents over the last few years but I'd argue they are quite distinct and unrelated.
The first major issue was around the Heartbleed bug in a widely used piece of software. Many many organisations used this software and were vulnerable because of it - the difference was we went public and forced a password update while others kept schtum.
Then there was the "Jeffrey hack" - which included multiple denial of service attacks when our servers were swamped, a phishing attack to gain access to people's passwords as well as the swatting and bomb threat stuff. This was organised on a board frequented by misogynists who wanted to teach Mumsnet/Mumsnetters a lesson. Our firewall and internal systems definitely weren't as good as they could be (and led to us to invest more heavily in security for sure) but the point is we do tend to attract more than our "fair share" of attacks (we are subject to denial of service attacks most weeks) in my view because we're a female dominated platform.
Then there was the pro-trans intern who inadvertently copied a user IP address and published it when was she was highlighting what she felt were anti-trans voices on Mumsnet. Again our procedures weren't perfect and we've looked carefully at how to improve them but they were far from unusual and the ICO were satisfied that we hadn't been negligent here and no fine was imposed. Unlike many organisations we've never shied away from hosting controversial debates and contrary opinions - it would of course be much easier (and more profitable) to shut those conversations down as many others have done and we'd court far fewer angry responses but we believe passionately in free speech and the power of discourse to help people see other points of view.
This most recent incident was, without doubt, our technical error. We released code that had a flaw and we need to do better. What I would say is that concurrence is one of the things that is hardest to test for, which is why it didn't manifest in our systems testing, but there's no denying we messed up. We should have triple and quadruple checked the code for such an important service upgrade and not relied on testing to pick up a problem. We will most definitely learn from that.
It's also true that the Mumsnet platform isn't as good overall as it could be and we could have made some of these upgrades and invested a bit more in team and infrastructure a few years back when we started to turn a profit. That's my fault to be honest - I was a bit burned by all those early years of struggling to make any revenue from the site and seeing lots of other websites in our space overstretch themselves on costs and go under/ make layoffs - so in retrospect I was slower to invest than I should have been, which has meant quite a few niggles particularly when we've made any updates over the years. And I can only apologise to users for that.
We're absolutely committed to changing that going forward and to becoming a best in class community platform for our users but we're on a journey and it will take a bit of time.
I know this might all sound a bit defensive but I wanted to try to add a bit of an alternative perspective because, well, I think sometimes our tech team are a bit unfairly criticised. I'm not in any way though suggesting we haven't made errors which have understandably led to concern and for which I am very sorry.