MNHQ do your advertisers know what happens here at night? Not very advertiser-friendly is it? The tabloids will be picking this up one day.

[NoCommentingFromNowOn]

AIBU to make my DH lick my arse while I shart straight into his mouth and he swallows every drop

If I have to read that then so do you.

Do you want screenshots? I mean, they’ve already been accepted by whoever or whatever is checking them, so I can put them here, yes?

So, at what point are your advertisers going to cancel their adverts with you and start advertising on a porn site which is more family friendly than here?

I believe this is the second or third night in a row? And you don’t even pay people to monitor this?

The trouble is, the CSA incident has shown that Justine won’t change her mind on this. It’s all about the £££. It’s just a shame she sends her minions like @BeckyAMumsnetto deliver that message rather than having the balls to do it herself.

And also if they do, why prevent me from posting a screenshot of it?

Agreed.

It would be interesting to see how many posts are made in the middle of the night, from a first time user, asking for help on an issue.

vs

How many posts have been made at night by a first time user, trolling.

Perhaps the answer is to place a notification of help line numbers that a user can contact while their account is in registration mode.

On a post asking for assistance, most of the time other poster replying will just add in helpline numbers anyway.

A "new posters" forum could help, since it would reduce the potential spam traffic dramatically. You could activate it at night, and people would be able to hide it. A hide all posts by this user button would also have helped. Limiting name changes to one in 24 hours would be helpful too.

Yet another option - if not already in place - is to change your filters outside moderators' working hours. This might mean sacrificing some swearing overnight. Perhaps it could apply only to newer accounts.

One could also flip this around and ask that any new user with a true emergency send their post for nightwatch approval, rather than react to posts as they come.

Perhaps some of these measures need not be permanent but could be triggered when there is a surge in offensive spam, including by nightwatch members.

It would be good to hear what solutions Mumsnet is considering. The responses so far seem a bit passive, though I accept you can't make policy for the collective, @BeckyAMumsnet

@BeckyAMumsnet I am surprised if that gif was available in the normal Selection but no images should be allowed really if they can’t be approved at night first

Yes but it didn’t work though did it? I was subjected to several offensive messages just opening a few threads.. maybe time to stop the ‘night watching’ and do some proper moderation instead

Sounds like MNHQ are not taking this seriously enough

Why are posters allowed to name change several times a night

They never do when something like this happens.

Do the night watchers not even get the edit function?

Me too. It looks like they have gone now, but I never even got an acknowledgment of the reports.
Obviously I’m pleased they’ve been taken down though

@NoCommentingFromNowOn sorry, crossed wires - I was referring to the gif they posted this thread. The other images we are reviewing now to see why they got through. We deal with a lot of images every day that are screened and blocked and while it's not perfect, it usually catches things like this. Will report back.

Actually @BeckyAMumsnet sorry to be harping on about this while other people are quite rightly more concerned with some of the inappropriate filth posted on here overnight, but while we have your attention on this thread, would you mind looking at something else for me? Especially as no-one responded to my report of another suspicious looking thread the other day.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/relationships/5565670-am-i-overreacting-to-this-note-from-my-husbands-colleague

This is a text book example of a thread I simply do not believe is real. (Please DO NOT immediately delete this for troll hunting. That will look very bad, under the circumstances.) Besides, I don't think it's a 'troll' as such. I think it's been placed on MN deliberately to stimulate engagement and therefore either drive revenue for MN, or increase exposure to specific advertising by the people who are paying to advertise here.

Now I am not accusing any person or any company specifically here and you may be unaware that this is even happening, but the rest of us who read all these threads (that you admins may only see when they get reported) know it is definitely happening. And we know this because we've been here a long time and we aren't stupid.

Could you please look at this account and see if this 'poster' has name changed to start several other threads, while never actually engaging with anyone else on outside of their own threads, such as performing any advanced searches or clicking on lots of active threads simply to read them, which is what a genuine, normal poster would do.

You could see if her '18 pretty happy years of marriage' are actually five years of being engaged to a man who won't fix a date for the wedding on her other thread last week, for example?

If the answer is no and it's a brand new account opened just for this thread, could you monitor it for a while to see if the 'poster' name changes very quickly to start another thread? And then another three days later? Or even 5 threads a day all under different names?

You get my drift, I'm sure. Thanks very much.

In the last expenses on companies house they made a profit of over £2.5 million after tax in 2024.

they can afford a few staff working at night to protect users without demanding users pay for it.

This is an appallingly naive response from MNHQ.

A lot of the work that protects the site overnight is actually the less visible stuff, with systems designed to stop malicious content getting through in the first place and we are constantly working to improve on it.

Newsflash - it isn't working!

Nightwatch are extra eyes, not unpaid moderators, and they have deliberately limited powers and responsibilities. We’re hugely grateful to them, but they are not expected to patrol the site all night or carry responsibility when a determined troll gets through.

So the situation is even worse than we thought? Nightwatch are not even the unpaid volunteers monitoring the site that we thought they were but unpaid volunteers who take a look whenever they can fit it in between whatever else they have going on and who, even if they notice something really unpleasant, can't deal with it anyway - apart from your whack-a-mole solution.

Also, I think we have all had enough of your responses to the multiple similar situations which is basically to try and make us feel sorry for Nightwatch who have been soooo busy and have had to deal with "grim" posts. Last night's posts were horrific and very far from being covered by grim. Either pay trained people properly to deal with this kind of thing or stop relying on people with no power who are going to need therapy (presumably not funded by MNHQ!) if they continue to be exposed to this kind of posting.

So if they’re not unpaid moderators, it’s fair to say that there is no moderation overnight?

Is it not really a case of one not knowing how well the system works on a regular basis, because if it works as it is supposed to, then people don't see it. If that makes sense.

There might be X number of attacks per 24 hours, but we only see one that gets through.

It's a bit like spam. I am in a different time zone, and as I sit at MN with a morning coffee I might see some spam. So I report them. And they appear to be auto checked and removed.

I am not any sort of mod, just a poster in a different time zone. And say anecdotally I report one spam per day while the UK is in bed, and that is repeated however many times by other users across the globe, that could add up to a lot of spam that a UK based user does not see in the morning.

So I would say that system works.

We can't say how well it works of course, but MN can because they know how much spam they delete.

So I would say that system works.

Whereas I might say that a system that exposes volunteers to the sort of abuse images that appeared last year, and is based on volunteers being available to hide offensive text and images that are reported overnight, manifestly does not work.

Hi all. We’ve got to the bottom of what happened here.

Our image moderation systems worked as they should, but there was a problem with GIFs pulled directly from GIPHY. We introduced GIFs in 2023 and haven’t had any issues until last night, when someone discovered that the library contains some fairly risqué material and deliberately used it to cause trouble.

To be clear, the GIFs we’ve seen didn’t contain nudity or depict sexual activity, but they were obviously inappropriate for the discussions in which they were posted.

We’ve now placed tighter restrictions on GIPHY content. That may mean the occasional perfectly innocent GIF gets caught too, but our priority is to make sure conversations aren’t derailed by this kind of nonsense.

Thanks to everyone who raised the issue.

They were posting things like this

Some of the available gifs below are a bit suspect imo, has someone checked them all?

So basically the usual MN response of ‘we’ve fixed it, stop talking to us about it, we’ve got our fingers in our ears now’.

Until it (or something similar) happens again.

@BeckyAMumsnet didn’t contain nudity or depict sexual activity
so you can approve my screenshot then.

And there were multiple user names, multiple posts, most of which had no images and no gifs. So what are you doing about that?

So I would say that ’We’ve got to the bottom of what happened here’ isn’t quite how I would describe it. But if you are happy and Justine is happy and the advertisers are happy, and we all know that they can come back tonight and post whatever they want wherever they want and some poor woman in Australia who has inexplicably volunteered to help a millionaire run a website is happy then I’m prepared to pretend I’m happy too.

I mean, that person needs to get a life 😂.

Tonight probably