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It's time to rethink the Night Watch volunteer system

6 replies

TwigletsAndRadishes · 03/02/2025 05:06

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.

BeckyAMumsnet · 03/02/2025 08:28

Hello, all. First off, we want to apologise to anyone who saw these images overnight and huge thanks to our night watch, whom we'll be in touch with separately. There are some good suggestions on this and other threads about the situation and we'll discuss them today. While this is fortunately a rare occurrence, obviously we don't want it to happen at all.

We are reporting the user to the police and will be back later with further updates. Please bear with us while we do this.

HebeMumsnet · 03/02/2025 12:21

Afternoon, everyone.

Understandably, there are a lot of threads in Site Stuff about what happened in the early hours of today. Just so we can keep everyone updated easily about what's happening, we're going to close the other threads in Site Stuff to new posts for now and will put any new updates on this thread.

For anyone who missed it, BeckyAMumsnet posted an update at 08.28 here this morning which gives some information. We'll be back as soon as we have any more to share. Thank you for your patience so far. As you can imagine we've been very busy here this morning but we will update as soon as possible.

JustineMumsnet · 03/02/2025 15:31

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

JustineMumsnet · 03/02/2025 15:53

IncaDove · 03/02/2025 15:40

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

You'll understand that we're not going to detail every troll countering measure here. That would be foolish I think.

JustineMumsnet · 03/02/2025 17:48

Hi all,
We've now disabled image posting from the site and are working on removing it from the Apps. We're also looking at some longer term AI alternatives to prevent recognise harmful content prior to being posted but they'll most likely take a few days to implement. Thanks.

BeckyAMumsnet · 04/02/2025 16:03

maudelovesharold · 04/02/2025 14:25

It’s absolutely a cover up. I’m not getting any notifications about this thread either, despite many other posts subsequent to me last opening it. I had posted on the pulled AIBU, that I thought it was quite canny of MN to ‘consolidate’ the discussion in various Site Stuff threads yesterday by closing all the threads which made any reference to the abusive images, and leaving this one, which sounds so innocuous, unless you know that NW being left on the back foot overnight, meant CSA images were being uploaded across the site over a 4 hour period, apparently with no efficient means of stopping them.

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.

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