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Monzo community forum removed from bank’s website after trolling incidents
The removal came weeks after Monzo suspended the forum in mid-May after an outbreak of spam and trolling, although the bank says the removal was unrelated.
Managing an online community is challenging at the best of times, and the work of moderating forums and message boards is often a full-time job.
Sadly, the world of digital banking communities is no different.
On 15 May, Monzo was forced to temporarily suspend its long-standing community forum, which has over 36,500 members, after an outbreak of spam and ‘trolling’.
One forum member described the incident to AltFi as a “recurrent childish problem”, where a “mischievous (and annoying)” group were using the forum as a playground for inciting arguments and disagreements between its members.
“Being Saturday, there was very little/no staff covering the forum. It’s the staff who do the banning, suspensions, etc, so it was a mess.”
The forum was placed in read-only mode until 24 May, when Monzo’s social media manager Richard Cook explained the move had been “to let things cool down” and make changes to how the forum operated.
Changes included increasing the hours that Alan Doe, Monzo’s sole community caretaker, spends looking after the forum and making it so appointed community moderators have to approve all new accounts and their first posts.
“Hopefully in time we can loosen these controls, and it’s a shame we’ve had to take these steps. But we believe they’re necessary,” Cook wrote.
On 15 June, Monzo updated its homepage on Monzo.com and removed its community landing page from the footer of the website as part of the change.
An individual close to the bank described the change as “completely unrelated” to what had happened in May.
However, the change means that at present, there are no public links to Monzo’s community forum via its website, although the forum can still be accessed from the ‘help’ section of the Monzo app.
A Monzo spokesperson told AltFi: "We are completely committed to our community forum and any suggestion otherwise is wholly inaccurate and misleading.”
Since Monzo’s earliest beginnings in 2015 its community forum has had a powerful influence on the bank, several iconic features including ‘Pots’ originated from discussions between forum members, who've collectively posted over 663,000 messages.
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