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.

It doesn't seem like MN has kept up with the times but hopefully steps have been taken to ensure that this cannot happen again.

Oh yes, I remember some poor individual getting the blame and posting an apology.

It was a long time ago now.

I think it was an intern, wasn't it?

MNHQ, you might want to think about using something like Amazon Rekognition image filtering software.

Not sure how you could install it for embedded images and previews, but it could definitely be used for uploads. Anything of suspicious nature could be flagged for a) mod review, or b) ask the user to manually view content at their discretion. For images as serious as these, you could block it all together. It's not perfect, of course, but worth a spike.

4chan have problems like this with users uploading content, but they have so many mods you can have users and IP addresses banned in about 20 seconds. Making new users use a Captcha or "select the images that contain a traffic light" anti-bot verification steps might help, too, as last night's incident is probably what I'd call a cyber attack.

Imagine if it was some sort of orchestrated attack involving many people with separate accounts, or someone IT savvy enough to work out how to hack the site and spam it with images over dozens and dozens of theads at once

It probably will be next time

I'm aware HQ have blocked image posting for now, but doubt very much this will be impossible to circumvent for someone with the skills ... after all they've supposedly been working on blocking scam/virus ads for months but still they appear

The thing is, they aren’t going to want to tell us what they use.

We know it wasn’t good enough, most particularly not good enough for Night Watch to have no back up.

And we know people want to shut MN down. The person who did this had a purpose in mind. I’m not keen to play into his hands.

And of course, it can happen pretty much anywhere on the internet. The idea is to be as safe as possible, but it’s always cat and mouse with the malicious actors.

MN has had significant problems with IT for years. It was clear with the botched site upgrade that they hadn't been investing enough leadership focus into the IT aspect of the business. Things have improved a bit but the tech side is still clearly the poor cousin.

Interesting that the AIBU thread on this has been deleted. Given it was letting a wider audience know that it happened.

How will you know if there’s reassurance if you’ve left?

So it seems MN have deleted an AIBU thread which was trying to make people aware that this had happened. They’re whole handling of this situation has been terrible (not the night watchers, they did what they could, I’m talking about actual MNHQ)

Yep, this is weird. They could have at least closed it and put something like "all further questions in Site Stuff".

Indeed but that may not be practical to implement today. Having a mod with full access, ability to see reports and ban posters and delete threads on 24 hours a day is a stop gap before other measures are added.

This is something that can easily be added and plenty of smaller less profitable forums do these kind of things already.

Agreed, they seem intent on covering it up!

yes all threads apart from this started disappearing about 2pm

Although as the thread has been deleted I’m at least assuming that means they have mods working tonight as I don’t think night watchers can delete threads? (Not sure as didn’t realise there wasn’t overnight moderators until this thread)

I wonder if people will start asking why they can't post photos, what will they be told?

Nothing to see here.

Except there was.

Yes, I've just come from the AIBU which had now been pulled. I find the whole thing extremely sinister, both that an individual or individuals who possess these illegal images have targeted MN and that the site wants to cover up the fact. I find it very troubling on both the perpetrators level but also the response.

It was helpfully drawing attention to the fact that Report does not function out of hours

And was also highlighting the unpaid nature of overnight 'moderation'

Oh absolutely. It was raising awareness of issues that clearly HQ didn't want to be raised.

I was literally just about to say that. I was halfway through posting on it (to defend MNHQ over something that had been misrepresented actually) and the thread disappeared. The thread was started by someone wanting to make people aware of what happened last night because lots of people feel there should have been some sort of general announcement made by now, rather than just keeping all of the MNHQ comment on here. The thread wasn't too bad, fairly calm, not too 'pitchforky' and quite constructive in relation to helping people understand what happens when you report a thread at night. Most people just wanted to understand what had gone on.

I think deleting it was a grave mistake and it's only going to add to speculation that there is some massive sort of cover up exercise going on. Oh dear MNHQ. That was a bad move. I know you are having a mare of a day, but that was ill judged and it won't help in the long run to censor people from discussing it.

Was it the one where everyone was arguing over what 'volunteer' meant?
This thread is still standing though https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5267137-to-remind-you-that-the-report-button-on-a-post-does-nothing-overnight?reply=141891877

Agreed.
I don't think it can be in doubt now it is being covered up, leaving room for speculation.
Why does MNHQ not want to acknowledge and address this truly troubling turn of events? To avoid impact on advertising revenue? To prevent users being frighted off from using the forum as it no longer feels like a safe space?

And the deletion message:

"Hi all,

We'll be updating site stuff as and when we can. We're taking this thread down now, whilst we check some things out behind the scenes."

It's the same sort of message you'd get if a suspected troll thread was being removed.

Yes, can't quite see how this has been demoted to 'site stuff' on a par with people asking for the laughing face response option to be removed.