Trolls, nastiness and Never-in-doubt

Hi Forum Folk

Just wanted to give a general response in answer to all the PMs, posts and general commenting going on over the never-in-doubt issue, but moreover the issue of trolling. Stick with me..

Firstly, the boring oft-repeated stuff. This forum doesn't cost a penny for you to use. The team, servers and resource allocated to it are limited and due to the sheer volume of traffic and comments, we use a post-moderation system with a "report an abuse" policy. We receive thousands, and usually many thousands of emails per day (it's not unheard of for us to get into the tens of thousands), the majority of whom consider their issue the most important and often demand immediate action. We are also simultaneously contending with frequent legal threats based on the comments on our forum commonly from users who have the luxury of anonimity.

Secondly, we start every complaint from a position of impartiality. Whilst it may be glaringly obvious to you who is at fault, we don't have a potted history of each and every thread and as such it is important we read every post thoroughly to ascertain the issues. In the recent case, the sheer amount of people who didn't just press the abuse button but waded in with opinions and elongated complaints to us was a big cause of the delay in the resolution of the issue. We have to read every post you make, the more posts you make the longer it takes.

Thirdly, we, and I, are real people (believe it or not) and we do care about the people behind the identities. We try our best, and we work hard to do the best we can. Sometimes you may perceive that we haven't acted quickly enough and I'm genuinely sorry when that happens. It isn't intentional and we try to resolve things as soon as we can.

Now to trolling as a concept. Yes, it happens and it's generally unpleasant. We have limited tools to stop it and as with all technology those intent on causing problems find ways to push our defenses. We try and adapt and fight back where we can. Personally, I've always found it a little sad that people choose to spend such a large proportion of their lives in this way but they do, and we have to deal with it.

Part of the issue we have is what people find offensive. This forum has a huge demographic and what is a robust opinion to one, is hugely upsetting to another. We do try and let things flow and have previously been accused of archaic and overbearing moderaton when we've removed robust comments. It's not easy to always get right and it's not immediately obvious whether people are trolling. In the recent case, several of the users reported had been around since 2006 and 2007 with no previous reports. Hopefully you can see our dilemma.

We try and take your comments as constructively as we can and my personal job is to look at ways to improve the team. Occasionally though it's frustrating and disappointing to read some of the comments people make about my team, and I hope this post goes someway to explaining things from our side.

Lastly, please do remember that this is only an online forum. You do have the luxury of anonymity and this isn't the real world. Yes, it does have social interaction and the community here, on the whole, is a pleasant and positive one. I understand to a lot of people this forum is very important. We, as the MoneySaving team, take a lot of positives from the friendships and help we see. However, it's really not worth getting upset over and sometimes a little perspective on what it is can work wonders.

I honestly hope this posts helps a little and we will take all your comments on board to try and improve our operation.

The one thing that would REALLY help us in future is for you to hit the abuse button and not take up the campaign by posting. I appreciate it can be hard, but it really does make things a lot quicker for us to deal with.