“Not in the spirit of the site”

[Darragon]

What does this mean and why are you now deleting posts under this justification? Presumably I did not actually break talk guidelines when I said the OP’s boyfriend sounded like a psychopath, so please could you confirm the ‘in-the-spirit-of-the-site’ way to describe a man who drove off instead of stopping to help a child he saw being hit by a car, apparently unmoved by it, mentioning it only in passing later in the day? Plenty of people have called him ND on that thread and been left to stand (and as an ND woman I find it disgraceful that people go straight to ND whenever a man shows abuser red flags). Why is it in the spirit of the site for people to be frequently ablist, ageist and racist on this site, and if we complain we get told we should just challenge those posters’ views, and it’s apparently in the spirit of the site to be an obvious troll nowadays, but it’s not ok to warn an OP about a potentially dangerous bloke she is dating? Is that really the spirit of this site these days?

MNHQ couldn’t give a toss about posters being ableist and only 1 in every 100 of my reports of blatant ableism, actually get deleted! Even the most horrendous anti-disability shite that I report, is always met with “We prefer these things to be challenged on the thread”. Yet I say something mildly constructively critical about quite literally anything else and it’s “COMMENT DELETED” 🤷🏼‍♀️

You are absolutely right. It is so harmful to autistic people to be used as an excuse for abusive behaviours.

Hi there @Darragon . Could you report the post or thread concerned and let us know in your report the time stamp of your deleted post. We'll happily take another look at it and explain more about the deletion if we can but we just need to know the exact post we're talking about here. Thanks"

Hello @Darragon we think we’ve now located the post you meant. It was deleted in error. It didn’t break the Talk guidelines, so we’ve reinstated it and corrected our records. We’re really sorry about that.

“Not in the spirit of the site” is a broad description, rather than a separate rule. We use it for posts or behaviour which, taken in context, seem clearly at odds with Mumsnet’s purpose of helping make parents’ lives easier. It can cover things that don’t fit neatly into a more specific guideline and is often the sort of thing regular users will recognise when they see it. It should only ever be used where the content and context support it. In this case, they very clearly didn’t. Sorry again.