It's time to rethink the Night Watch volunteer system

[TwigletsAndRadishes]

After the truly awful photos that have been posted on MNin the early hours of this morning, which I will never un-see, I think you need to have a different policy for overnight moderation.

The site is big enough and money-making enough to support a better system by now. There really needs to be proper 24 hour IT cover. At the very least, the Night Watch volunteers should be able to call a member of MNHQ who is on call overnight who has the ability to either deal with the issue or shut the whole forum down until it can be dealt with properly by the IT bods in the morning.

It's only been a handful of threads affected this evening, but it could potentially be a major spamming of dozens or even hundreds of threads next time. This site is used in other parts of the world in different time zones where more people risk seeing the grossly disturbing content than a relative handful of us up at 3am in the UK.

The current system relies on posters reporting any offending theads and hoping that a volunteer will pick up the report in good time and hide the thread. This morning one of the threads affected took far too long to be hidden, not that I am blaming an unpaid volunteer for that.

Only if you are logged in. That poster meant she was logged in on her phone but not on her laptop.

But it seemed that reporting wasn't as effective as posting on the nigjtwatch thread, which most posters, including me, wouldnt have known.

I didn’t realise you could? I tried to report something years ago, and got a ‘you need to be logged’ notice so have never tried to use the report button when logged out since. Good to know, but to be honest I think I’m going to leave the site after this. Absolutely sickened by what I saw.

I don’t think Nightwatch even see reports.

I'm hanging about to see their response and then I think I'm done with this place. I can't escape these images. They were just THERE.
I work in mental health care and thought I was largely desensitised to most things but all day I've been thinking about those kids. I'm so sickened by it.

And people did report but they were still there hours later

Same. Will see how this pans out, then I’m done.

I know! And where is the support for anyone who saw them, having to go about their daily life traumatised!!

The silence is deafening.

Anyone know what time the NW take over, normally?

I’m astonished that a business making as much as Mumsnet does, relies on volunteers to run any part of that business.

Presumably, as posting pictures is still an option, it's possible for the same to happen tonight as soon as the day shift clock out.

Have MN addressed this in any way? I normally look through MN during night feeds and am so glad I didn’t click on those threads. If no action is taken then I won’t be back on here anymore.

They've done nothing to stop it.

Thank you for doing that.

good point someone made about work devices. The last school I worked in allowed personal use and the whole system was scanned daily and flagged any staff or students who had accessed inappropriate content somehow.

Lots of SM sites operate a system where if a post/image gets lots of reports in a short period of time it is automatically hidden until it can be looked at by a moderator. So it's really not difficult to deal with issues such as these. It wouldn't have stopped the images being posted, but it means they wouldn't have been up for as long as they were.

Ahh sorry, I didn't realise you were logged out on your laptop until @DoAWheelie pointed out it might've been the case.

So they haven't even taken what would be a very sensible step i.e. temporarily suspending the ability to posts images, until this can be rectified?

No one looks at reports till morning anyway.

@IncaDove, no, to be honest I was surprised I was allowed to post a screenshot upthread.

Will there even be a night watch tonight? Given the fact the poor mods are traumatised?

Nope. I just checked.

Surely MNHQ will at the very least have proper moderation for the next few nights? It would be mad not to.

Another really good point. There can be no reason other than choosing they didn’t want to spend any of the millions of profit on safety, to not have taken these measures.

Someone asked this question a couple of weeks ago.

No hard and fast rule was the answer. (The thread confirms that they sometimes work late and sometimes don't)

www.mumsnet.com/talk/the_night_watch/5254467-what-time-do-modsmnhq-clock-off