Afternoon. Sorry to be a bit late to this thread
Thought it might be useful to post up a few clarifications, as it seems there are some posters who are still unclear about a few recent thangs...
OK, so the Radical Feminism topic is indeed now no more. We said when we created it, in response to many requests, that, seeing as there were also some objections to the idea, we would take the topic down if it wasn't used. It wasn't used, so it is now toast.
Secondly, neither Artex nor anyone else (that we're aware of) trollhunted bereaved mothers on MN. We did have some reports from posters who were concerned about other posters in our Bereavement topic - and we did follow up their concerns.
As it happens, the poster whom people seem to be inferring was the one who was trollhunted gave us no reason to suspect that she wasn't genuine. But, very sadly, there have been one or two 'bereavement trolls' on that board in the recent past, so we, as always, were grateful to those who reported. We always are.
There now follows a short rant point about MRAs past and hopefully not present. We have acknowledged before that, when the Feminism category of topics was created, we were slow to understand that it would attract a fair few goady visitors, intent only on provoking trouble on the boards.
We are sorry that we took a while to cotton on to their MO. But, as several posters on this thread have already pointed out, they can be quite tricky to spot at first. They don't exactly run onto threads, shouting, "We hate feminists, ra ra ra!", but rather 'bed themselves in' with a few weeks of innocuous posting before starting to goad proper.
Things were undoubtedly made trickier by the fact that some posters reacted to them by posting repeated personal attacks. While we appreciate that this may be highly cathartic, it does break our guidelines.
And it also makes it quite difficult to warn someone for goading: they can - and did - simply point to the quadrillion personal attacks on them, and bat their eyelids all innocent-like.
As ever, we're grateful to those who didn't rise to the bait and, instead, kept reporting the sometimes ever-so-subtle goading. We wish we'd been quicker off the mark - but we think we did get there in the end.
Anyhoo, water under the (goady troll) bridge, hopefully.
We do understand that the events of past few months have been upsetting for many who post (or used to post) in Feminism - and we're sad to see that so many still feel so raw about it.
We do think, though, that there's nothing to be gained from going over and over what happened or didn't happen: it's clear from many posts on this thread that there are many versions and sub-versions of the truth and probably very few people who know every detail of what really happened. Even we at MNHQ don't know it all - as so much happened off-board.
We also hope that those Mumsnetters who've (unfairly) written Feminism (the category, not the concept) off as a nasty, unwelcoming place will revise their opinion and venture this way once in a while. There's definitely nothing we'd welcome more than strong opinions, fiercely held - as long as those who hold them, and those who hold equally strong but different ones, can spar and debate without rancour or personal attacks.