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.

Hi there - notifications have not been disabled for this thread - please check your settings - and it has appeared in both Active and Trending today. We consolidated the threads as we couldn't possibly be across everyone's questions if they were posted on multiple threads - hence directing users towards one was the most sensible solution yesterday.

Honestly, I bet the pervert who did this is loving the constant discussion. It happened, it was awful but it has been addressed and measures are in place to prevent a repeat. Surely that's good enough.

Exactly this ^

If you don't want to feed a troll then you sure as hell don't want to feed the pondscum who posted these CSA images.

Police are investigating and MNHQ have taken sensible short term measures and are looking into longer term solutions.

I would personally rather they took their time and did this properly.

Mumsnet targeted with child sexual abuse images www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93qw3lw4kvo

Again please stop calling someone who has committed criminal sexual offences against children a troll. Stop minimising the distribution of csa records.

That article should have included the annual turnover as the closing lines make it sound like a little charity like entity. It also should highlight that those volunteers had no training or means to escalate an urgent illegal incident to anyone.

The fact it took the bbc to report it seems to suggest there is some coordination or mutual agreement with the tabloids to me. This would have been great for dm clickbait usually and it does seem strange to me at least that they didn’t report. Obviously just my opinion.

If that's aimed at me you need to re-read my post.....

Relieved to read the BBC report.
My thanks to those who brought the matter to the attention of the press.

MN have a thread on site stuff
This is one of their posts
Yes I agree that someone Senior needs to be contactable at all times. That's something we're absolutely ensuring is the case going forward

I'm not the only one then. None of them are in my notifications.

I'm glad it's been confirmed the NW volunteers have been offered support. I really feel for them

I think the BBC report said 'moderators'. I hope that includes NW volunteers.

Strange, it has been in mine. I've also seen it on trending and active. It might be your settings

I'm glad it's been confirmed the NW volunteers have been offered support.
Seems odd that despite many queries on here about just this that we learn confirmation of support from a BBC report.
And not from a post on MN.

It was on MN.

Oh , apologies. I missed that.

@Happysack sorry this is not who I want to tag but I can't delete

@IncaDove was it a post on this thread?

Yes it's also just been on BBC Radio 2 news.

I see multiple people claiming the child abuse images were AI generated. You have zero evidence of that. It just smacks of trying to minimise

Very frustrating that Justine is still defending the use of volunteers and fails to recognise that while the incident may still have occurred with professional moderators it could have been dealt with and contained much more quickly with professional moderators who have full access to all the systems in use during the day. This would have resulted in less people seeing those awful images.

That's why people are angry.

People want to see changes that protect users and volunteers. They are worried about being exposed to this on here in future. Calling for change and expecting the CEO to take this seriously is not bad faith or trolling.

@WorriedRelative nothing will change. The model is about extracting as much profit as possible

Exactly what I was thinking.

That is very clear.

All about the money and screw the wellbeing of the users who help make that profit.