I have noticed that there are a number of deeply unpleasant posters across a lot of threads, people with no interest in supporting an OP with advice or even very strongly held opinions of their own, but rather focused on being goady, insulting and aggressive.
These posters don’t veer into the realm of personal attack but they do shut discussion down and I imagine make OPs who have to experience them less willing to post in the future.
Does there exist a way to report these posters?
And if not, might I suggest a “posts not in the spirit of Mumsnet” report function. One report wouldn’t be enough for mumsnet to take action but perhaps if a user gets say, 20 such reports, then they get a time out from using their account?
Perhaps Mumsnet feels that that these posters keep engagement up because they cause arguments but I think the beauty of the site is cheerful, principled or even heated disagreement and debate whereas these poisonous posters aren’t trying to make a case, they’re just nitpicking and bitter and serve to derail threads or simply silence the OP so other users don’t get anymore updates.
Reddit has the upvote and downvote function where posters like this would just get downvoted until their posts were hidden from view. I think mumsnet needs a way to deal with them too.