Links in posts to mumsnet site sections

[popehilarious]

Noticed a few posts mentioning things like alcohol and reviews and they'd had links added to relevant sections of the mumsnet site. Wondered if this was an automatic thing. I used to see it in the Guardian and it would drive me mad!

It's tacky as hell at best; and exploitative at worst. What it really, really isn't, is 'helpful'. Just nasty, mumsnet.

Auto inserting deep links into your OWN content saves time and makes sense. Inserting them into people's posts on a forum is really dodgy.

Couldn't have said it any better.

This seems an awful idea, MNHQ. Really awful.

I really hope they don’t keep trying to make this work and just ditch it but sadly doubt that will be the case. Where there’s money to be made...

And I’ve just realised they also miss an opportunity link to anything useful you might want to click through to. I was on a thread yesterday about DD’s health condition and someone suggested it might be underlying condition X, and actually a hyperlink through to more info about X, from a reputable source, would be been genuinely handy.

(Obvs I can and did google, but I’m just saying if you’re going to have these links at least make them useful).

Thanks for responding @JustineMumsnet - I see the links have been switched off now.

Hi all,
We've been using links in the Pregnancy forums for some time to link certain keywords to our pregnancy pages. The idea was to extend this to other forums to link to our reviews and shopping and offers content, as our research shows that lots of Mumsnet users aren't aware of these pages.

It is meant to be a useful feature (as well as being good practice for Google search ranking). However, as you saw, we badly messed up the implementation which meant that it was applied to the wrong keywords in the wrong places.

As said, we've rolled it back now and will test much more thoroughly before re-introducing it. We will also make sure there's an off-switch function for those who don't want this feature.

Apologies again for the inconvenience.

@bruffin

For example, if when you check you can see someone is a PBP, then you should be able to stop them signing up in the first place. Yes, surely getting rid of trolls, would be far more helpful.

We do have some automation in place to check for this - but without going into the detail for obvious reasons, the tech-savvy troll can be quite tricky to stop. We are working on this though as well as meeting with other forums to see what we can learn from them and to share best practice.

Thank you Justine.

bruffin

They can only identify trolls by email address and/or IP really...
And it's easy to mask/change your IP address - and definitely seconds to create a new email!

@JustineMumsnet - is there a way to make the auto-inserted links different to user inserted. Eg. different colour/italicised?

But how do they know after the fact the are pbp. When dh changed setting on h9me computer to a vpn i could sign in or post on MN.

they can't reallllly tell. But they do err on the side of caution
Most trolls are stupid though and wont do things like mask IP addresses

[quote 00100001]@JustineMumsnet - is there a way to make the auto-inserted links different to user inserted. Eg. different colour/italicised?[/quote]

We can certainly look at that. thanks for the thought.

That looks awful though; from a CX point of view, people will just stop reading. It looks spammy and poor quality. You'll cannibalise your own traffic.

Has it gone now?
I haven’t noticed it recently.

Hang on washing machine, trousers.

Would you look at that. It has.