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.

Profiteering of the backs of women people working for free is not a good look. Considering how worked up users get about poor working conditions at Amazon and deliveroo, this is a whole new level.

If they’re leaving images active, that’s it for me. I’ll leave the account open for a month in case they need to contact me but I can’t stay on here when that could be there any time I scroll down.

I’ve forgotten who said they were archiving. I’d like to know so I can pm if this thread goes poof. I can’t scroll back because of endless glitching.

If i were a volunteer nightwatch mod, there be no way in hell I'd be logging on tonight. I hope those from yesterday are being supported, but somehow I doubt it.

It’s now over 16 hours since the first image was reported. Photos still able to be posted and no information on whether any steps have been taken to protect visitors from more of the same.

I’m screenshotting everything. I suggest everyone does the same.

Just been reading what happened last night, absolutely disgraceful. There’s so many issues with this site, it can’t keep users safe.

No 24/7 moderation, relies on volunteers and no one has any idea when they start or how to contact them.
Asking people to post links to an obscure part of the site is completely insufficient and it was inappropriate to ask users to do that last night (but was the only option so shit for everyone)
No uniform way to identify moderators as night watch don’t have the blue background. Even mumsnet staff have different names like BeckyAMumsnet or MattTech.
Anyone could name change to ‘nightwatch xyz’ further compounding confusing over who moderates at night.
If you click report post the options for why you are reporting are dreadful and offer no prioritisation for the moderators. Reddit for example, has specific categories for minor abuse, self harm and violence which should be a priority for reviewing over ‘not a genuine poster’ 🙄
There should be limits on new posters, such as restrictions on posting photos and certain boards or starting posts to limit the ability of a poster.

The above is just a summary of what I’ve read on this thread, there’s no doubt more issues. MN burying it all it’s quite disgraceful too, they should be open about what happened and communicate what they are doing to keep users safe. Im also considering deleting my account. No faith or confidence in the moderation at all.

At the very minimum NW should have access to see anything that has been reported via the report button. It's an absolute phaff to have to copy the link to any offensive thread and then find the NW page to paste it there. Thats if you even know about the NW thing.

There are also some official MNHQ responses / answers on this thread (from 2017 where concerns were raised) about the use of NW and what time they took over)

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3048806-To-be-surprised-MN-is-moderated-by-volunteers-at-night

Last night the site, as you know was subject to the most appalling type of trolling with some vile images being posted. Pretty much all the images were removed within an hour of posting and we're very grateful to the Nightwatch for doing that, but it's clear that going forward we need to be able to restrict these attacks at the point of posting, rather than post hoc. Consequently we're looking at a number of measures to screen images including restricting how quickly you can post after you register and we'll be implementing those changes as a matter of urgency. I'm very sorry to anyone who was on the site overnight and was subjected to the images - please be assured we're going to do everything we can to stop it happening again. Justine

The night watch has on multiple occasions been shown to be much slower to react effectively than the normal hours service - what is to be done about that ?

This may have been the worst but certainly not the only time the weakness of the night watch has been exploited

Here's.the transcript from the last MNHQ post on the thread I've just shared (from 2017)

"Hi all - cheers for your reports
This is something we posted about over on the site stuff thread over here.
Just to recap - at the moment our busiest periods are during the day, and in the evening up to around 11pm. After that we're very lucky that the Nightwatch volunteers take over, and are able to hide threads till the morning lot can take a look in at 7am. It's incredibly helpful in preventing the occasional dodgy thread upsetting MNers and we're really grateful that the NW are prepared to help us and their fellow MNers out. We don't ask them to make decisions or investigate anything, which would feel like too much - as would asking the NW chaps to commit to any particular hours or days!
We could take another look at the data but broadly, if we had an 'official' mod overnight, we'd be shifting resource across from the busier fully staffed day and evening shifts, which seems a bit counterintuitive. The NW team seem happy overall (and it really is appreciated!) and it seems a shame to mess with things - some folks genuinely are happy to help both MNHQ and the MNer community out, and they do a brilliant job".

And where is your duty of care to the people affected @JustineMumsnet ? This isn’t good enough. You have had plenty of time to have the site properly moderated by PAID moderations and ensure there was filtering on to keep users safe. This isn’t trolling this is your audience being exposed to illegal child abuse images.

Absolutely seething with rage with that minimising post. You deserve all the lawsuits and bad media coming to you mumsnet.

Will "everything you can" include the same procedures and staffing being in place 24/7?

That was all a bit blah blah blah, wasn't it.

Vile images? Name it, child sexual abuse images. You do not deserve to run a site for mums, when you put profit over the safety of your users.

This isn't enough.

I wonder if Justine has actually seen the images.

An hour is a hell of a long time. Don't blame NW. I question why you don't have filters. It's mad.

Disabling posting images should be done now. I can't be the only one not wanting to click on threads at the moment.

But they weren’t all down within an hour were they?

I wonder if she has a soul?

As ever. It's sad how they haven't learned better communication at this point.

What are you doing to prevent it happening again? I think people have a right to know.