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.

So what can be done, if for example I phone the police at 2am? I can report that I've seen it and what will they then do at 2am? Trace Justine's address and send the boys round to get her out of bed?

I mean someone who actually works for MN should have been out of bed and ready to deal with it, clearly. But unless I am very naive about what goes on in the background, I have little faith that much would happen if I were to have called the police in my home town to report photos (not a live stream of abuse so no proof of immediate harm, photos probably presumed to be historic) I saw on an internet forum in the middle of the night.

Also very glad I had an early night last night! Hope everyone who saw whatever is posted is ok

Yeah a company making £2.3 million profit per year can afford to fucking run it properly 24/7. Greedy bastards let this happen by relying on volunteers instead of employing people properly at night.

I've used the internet for 30 odd years and managed to never come across such images before.
I'm really quite unhappy that they've been forced upon me as I'm sure the volunteers any anyone else that had to deal with them

MN just remove photo functionality, no one needs 'Cat tax', parking diagrams or before and after photos that much.

What? Did they ask people to post the links publically on a thread or privately? If it was the former that's atrocious!

Based on what I saw last night I will no longer be using MN. This is a humongous failure in systems to keep people safe.

Thankyou @TwigletsAndRadishes
@myplace
I'm just so fucking utterly sick of there being no safe space anywhere. .
I belonged to a totally normal, useful, little FB group about property in an area I'm moving to - and it was recently hit by an absolutely hideous image. I left immediately, so I lost that. And I'll never unsee it.
It wasn't the volunteers ' fault.
But this is a giant site now, and many of the suggestions above should have been implemented eons ago - just as the PPs have pointed out.
I know it's everywhere. It happened to my friend when she was looking for something like fucking cake decorating on pinterest.
And there's no fucking excuse now MN is a juggernaut: we're not back when it was all green hills around here.

I honestly feel fearful to open any threads on here until this gets cast-iron resolved. The ability to post photos needs to be removed completely. We don’t need it if it comes at this high of a price, surely. No one should be faced with this. Not volunteers, not mods.

You don’t think there are cyber police with the ability to contact the site host and take it down? It’s not a local Bobby job.

And you and I shouldn’t be trying to guess what can be done-there should be a named person available 24/7 trained and authorised to take action.

They were posted on random, entirely normal threads.

Are day mods paid?

I don't think the volunteers should be taking the heat here.
They are likely untrained beyond how to view reports and hide threads.
They needed to know what the threads were in order to hide them. They should have said report them rather than link them but the focus here should not be on the people mn is using to cheap out on properly trained staff.

I saw a few posts alluding to what was happening last night so immediately stopped reading mn to avoid seeing anything.

I think that mn wouldn't be the same without the ability to post screenshot, links and photos, and that removing the functionality all together would be too knee jerk.

But MN absolutely needs paid moderation of the site 24 hours a day, and also maybe some sort verification using ID before a poster can have the ability to post images.

Oh my word, this is horrific.

As others have said, this isn't some unforeseeable event. The night watch system has never really worked (no fault of the volunteers) but it shouldn't have gotten to this stage. I don't know why MN refuses to run more competently - usually it's the IT infrastructure that's mindbogglingly inadequate but this takes the biscuit.

Publicly on a thread

If I was a volunteer night watch I’d be withdrawing my services with immediate effect. No unpaid volunteer should be subjected to that.

Please let's not start bashing the night watch volunteers. They were clearly not properly trained to deal with this and acted in a panic, trying to deal with multiple threads and people complaining that they were still up and visible for too long.

I'm not sure whether they remembered to say specifically that any link to offending threads should have been sent privately to them and NOT posted on the a thread. Perhaps they assumed it was a given because they were thinking on their feet and overlooked that detail. Either way, they should not be held accountable. They were just trying to do their best in a difficult situation.

Totally agree with this

Yes I believe just regular thread titles

Edited to add - I think the one that says URGENT in trending had some but it’s still up so AVOID!!!!!

I guess even with proper IT people overnight the images would still have been put up. So either stop photos all together which would be a shame or make a much longer period (inc need for a minimum number of posts) before a new member can post. Or some sort of auto software which might recognise content and not allow anything suspicious (is that a thing).

How different is this from Facebook? I could join a fb group and post photos without admin approval? Do they have auto software?

I remember when MN instigated volunteer night guards… but that was YEARS ago!
Come on MN!

Throw some £££ and AI at this.

Fb takes photos of bf down so yes such software must exist

There isn't really a need to have photos on here is there? That would be a pretty easily fix but it wouldn't stop this sort of attack as they would just use words which are just as powerful.

Another one here who is really glad I got a full night's sleep for a change.

If Chat GPT can describe any image for the average user and discuss it in detail (which it can, it's awesome), then the same tech can recognise potentially harmful images and filter them for human review. It's not difficult, or expensive... just more expensive than 'volunteers' I guess.

Don't forget as well, NW don't have the same powers as MN day mods have. NW can only hide posts and threads for MN to deal with during working hours. The volunteers had no powers to switch anything off or even block users afaik, they could only react and hide stuff after the damage was done.