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.

Yes, at least disable images while you get a better strategy in place. People can wait to see if their house or dress looks ok.

There was nothing wrong with your post.

@JustineMumsnet MN users absolutely have a right to know what (if anything) is being done to keep them safe when they use your site. MN’s response to this is honestly nothing short of shameful.

Wow.

Please don't treat us like children @JustineMumsnet It's hardly outlining your security plans if you a) give us some indication that moderation will immediately be increased at night and b) that the ability to upload any photos has currently been withdrawn.

And could you also stop using the word 'troll' to describe a criminal deviant of the worst kind.

@JustineMumsnet There needs to be a banner on top of all pages warning users of what has happened and that it can happen again.

Too many people are completely unaware and let’s face it, this is very likely to happen again. At the very least, it certainly isn’t even remotely unlikely since MN have implemented exactly…zero changes to stop it.

Are you going to pay moderators overnight rather than having sporadic volunteer night watch that relies on a rarely used forum to report? People with jobs in moderation often have access to third party support services for events like this where they have seen horrendous things, do the volunteers?

Absolutely dumbfounded by @JustineMumsnet’s responses. Time for me to leave MN, I think. I imagine a lot of posters will feel similarly.

I suspect a lot of advertisers might leave if they were aware.

Thank you. I didn’t think so either.

I’ve read the talk guidelines again and can’t see what rule I’ve broken.

Criticism of Justine clearly isn’t tolerated, but that fact isn’t published.

Strange.

Justine is damned if she doesn't post and damned if she does.

There's not point in bombarding her with questions.

MNHQ obviously have a lot to sort out and anything we're allowed to know, I'm sure we'll be told in due course.

If she or the other mods were to stay on these threads answering questions, they'd be here all day and unable to do anything else.

Best to leave it to them for now and we're all able to log off if we don't like it.

The point, also, is that there doesn't seem to be any real countermeasures! If so, the images would not have posted?

Wow. Gobsmacked. You are getting multiple posts from people badly traumatised from seeing these images, and are ignoring our requests for support in dealing with this. Then to add salt in the wound are just cherry picking which posts you respond to, ignoring us. Absolutely soulless woman.

Well you haven't even suspended image posting? Are you planning to deal with this proactively or not?

Lawsuits and loss of advertisers will hit your bottom line far more than forking out the resources to prevent this from happening again.

An hour is way too long for such material to be visible. You have the resources to zap posts that talk about other threads or be "not in the spirit" so why not to remove abhorrent material like this within minutes of it appearing and nip such an attack in the bud?

Totally agree. Sounds like MN have gone into full arse-covering mode, that response is disgraceful. "We're sorting it, don't you worry your pretty little heads about it".

The images were down within an hour (as if that constitutes a reasonable response) because a poor volunteer had to look at them to hide the thread. The volunteer could not prevent the poster from continuing to post, I believe? In what world is that acceptable?

That isn't what was being asked and not all measures need to be kept confidential.

This isn't a request for details of any technical controls.

You might, for example, consider paying the night mods and putting them on the reporting system.
You might have something to say about ensuring there is a clear escalation path in this situation so OOO mods can access business support (for decisions) and tech support (to implement tech decisions such as temporary suspension of image posting, users or some other feature).

You may not have it all at your fingertips right now but you could also, say, that you will make a fuller statement includingi updates on customer facing changes and enhancements to support OOO mods tomorrow or later in the week.

All of these would be helpful to your members, none of them would give trolls or other attackers the keys to MN Towers

It's right though.

My first post responding to Justine's was also deleted. I don't like being silenced. I'd recommend everyone screenshots their comments as soon as they've posted. I can see this going further.

How? If you've got cast iron methods for preventing this kind of thing in place. then it doesn't matter who knows about them because it won't be possible to circumvent them.

It’s frustrating if we mention The Radfords or The Mcanns in any less than positive way it gets deleted pronto but this was left up (and swept under the carpet in the morning).

The problem last night though was that reporting was getting no where. I was on one of the first threads hit. I reported as did countless others. After 10 minutes and a second report it was still there. It was then that I remembered to post in NightWatch.

The first one was at 11.15 or there abouts. The fact it was still going on on different threads at 4.30 in the morning is unacceptable. This was not NW’s fault, they were upset and doing the best they could.

It should have been shut down as soon as they realised this wasn’t a one off post.

@JustineMumsnet if/when it happens again tonight, who are we reporting to? The same Nightwatch? If so, you need to make it clear that you have to not press the ‘report’ button, but to put a link to the thread containing CSA on the Nightwatch thread, as I was completely unaware of this when I was exposed to the images last night.

Don't link to it!!!! That's crime.

And wouldn't you think Justine would warn users about this, at the very least?

Well yes, that’s kind of my point. Unfortunately last night that was the only way to alert Nightwatch to what was happening. We were all pressing the report button and the images were still there, until thankfully one poster remembered that you had to go to the Nightwatch thread.
@JustineMumsnet needs, at the very least, to tell us exactly what to do when it happens again. Which I’m sure it will now people know how it easy it is.