[Poppy]

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share their thoughts and concerns about the trial opening of the forum.

We appreciate these changes are making some users concerned about privacy. We hope to speak to some of those concerns, but encourage you to keep sharing your experiences and we will do our best to provide as much information as possible.

Privacy

The main concern we are hearing from users is around privacy. The changes to the forum mean that anyone can view the forum, even when not logged in, and some of you have raised concerns about your posts being found. If this is a concern of yours, here are some things to keep in mind:

Gingerbread will continue to keep privacy as crucial to the forum. At the moment, if we see a user with an identifiable username such as an email address or their full name or birthday, for example, we alert the member that they should change their username. We also recommend at registration that people do not use their email address so they are not easily discoverable.

·         The forum will continue to be monitored for safeguarding and moderation. We have trained Gingerbread staff who monitor the forum throughout the week, to make sure people are following the guidelines. This includes making sure people are not giving out personal, identifying details such as phone numbers or addresses, and this will continue.

·         ‘Open’ forums are in the majority. Most forums are open to public view, and will have similar levels of anonymity to the new Gingerbread forum. Having forum posts available in search results is true of lots of other forums, such as Mumsnet, Scope, Breast Cancer Care. It is very unlikely, without identifying details such as a name or email address, that anyone could find you through a search engine.

·         You can edit old posts on the forum  if you feel this would help to protect your identity you can edit content of previous posts to remove any details you think might identify you.

With all of this being said, we do understand that parents may feel uncomfortable with posts being made public. We hope that existing forum users choose to come with us on this journey trialling the opening of the forum. We encourage all users to make any necessary changes to their profile and posts so that they are genuinely anonymous and unidentifiable in a more public setting. Although we’re sorry to hear that some users are choosing not to continue with the forum with this change coming in, we respect and understand that decision.

Why is this happening?

We are trialling opening the forum for three months and our belief (based on user research and research with other organisations) is that this will open the door of the forum to many more single parents who currently don’t know it exists. We will use these months to monitor feedback, forum activity, membership and traffic carefully and are open to being proven incorrect in our theory, in which case we will review the decision. Here are some key things that influenced our decision:

 The majority of parents who currently access our forum read, but do not post. This indicates to us that a lot of parents are comfortable only reading posts, and requiring people to register prevents single parents from getting support from the community of single parents we have on our forum. We want to make our forum accessible to these parents.

·         We want more single parents to benefit from the forum. Currently, over 14,000 people have signed up to access the forum, and we are keen for this access to spread to other single parents who would benefit from the support of the forum. Based on the frequency of posts and number of visitors to the forum, we know it’s bigger than it’s ever been, but that more voices would make the forum an even more vibrant supportive community.

Please do continue to discuss and share your concerns. We appreciate hearing your ideas about ways to balance privacy and accessibility. If you have any specific feedback that you’d like to share we’d be very grateful if you could email directly to groups@gingerbread.org.uk

Poppy at Gingerbread x

 

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