Hey all, I just wanted to share a few small updates about things weâve been doing recently to help keep our community a helpful, inclusive place 
Some of you might have noticed that our lovely forum has been the target of some co-ordinated reputational attacks in the last few weeks. We wonât stand for this, and itâs all of our duties as active forum posters to ensure that this doesnât happen, so weâve taken a few steps 
First of all, weâve applied a large-scale block of temporary email addresses. Whatâs a temporary email address? Quite simply, there are websites on which you can go on that autogenerate random email addresses that you can use to sign up for things. In the case of forums, it is a huge indicator of someone being a âBad Actorâ, so from now on, temporary email addresses will not be allowed to register accounts.
Secondly, weâve put together an internal document known as the âBad Actor Frameworkâ. This is a list of known behaviours or attributes of someone that has signed up here with bad intentions. This might include a previously banned member utilising different methods to mask who they are. The beauty of this list is that no individual behaviour might raise flags, but the more attributes a user has, the more likely it is that they are a Bad Actor. We wonât be publishing this list with you, because it would make it easy for people to attempt to circumvent what is on it, but we are confident in the way that it works.
Finally, for the moment weâve placed a few extra limits on newly signed up users, which means that their first few posts will require manual verification, and itâll take a little longer for them to get to Trust Level 1. The visible difference here will mean that a new user wonât have their first few posts published right away until we can approve them. We can both relax and strengthen these numbers as appropriate if needs be. For the most part, there will usually be admins/moderators around to do these approvals on a regular basis, but weâre looking into a system to get a few more staff members who want to be more involved trained up on handling this too.
I want to thank all of you for being incredible members of our community. But when major media organisations are running sponsored (paid) social media posts directly referencing things said on our forum, itâs important for us to be able to monitor these things. This is not any form of censorship. Valid criticism, after all, still comes from real users - and comes from a place of good intention that generally doesnât fall into the above framework. What we are looking to stamp out is the people that come here with bad intentions - whether thatâs a co-ordinated reputational attack, or simply trolling. One less toxic, but still annoying and unnecessary example of this might well be people signing up simply to spam referral links all over the place - you might remember we saw this a while back with things like âInitiative Qâ.
Weâve lost some good posters in the past who simply get frustrated with bad actors and toxicity, and this isnât the place for that, and we want to prevent that from happening.
Ultimately - this community exists for Monzo users, supporters, and valid critics to enjoy discussing our product, but in a healthy way, and with good intentions. I believe that this community is a shining star in the fintech space, and even the modern internet space at large, as a proof point of how involving as many of our customers as possible helps us to continue building something amazing. And allowing bad actors on our platform actively damages that - it makes both staff and customers less willing to engage, and thatâs not acceptable.
Happy to take any questions 
