Apologies if any of that doesn’t add up - or seems out of place! I started writing it an hour or two before this place went down 
Edit: should have proof read it… going back now
By that logic, and given the testimony of multiple people on this thread, it appears that Monzo’s general ethos has been one of bullying and hypocrisy …
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I don’t agree with that at all, but I see it from the other side, as a member of staff.
I have seen behaviour from some people, across various forms of communication with Monzo that can only be classed as bullying and is completely inappropriate towards both staff and other people.
Often the people who are being abusive don’t recognise that they’re doing so.
Surely it’s the right of any community admin or moderation team to define what is and isn’t acceptable on their community, rather than members?
Edit: I should be clear that I’m not saying anybody posting here is guilty of any other the above, I’m just trying to share a different perspective (and play devils advocate 
).
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I fully appreciate what you’re saying, but if this is the way the Community is going I hope that this place can take over all the general discussions I care about on the Community and that I can leave that place. Whilst I agree that a business needs to protect its image, I don’t think that an authoritarian purge of bad press or undesirable topics is the way to go.
Criticism should be addressed, not suppressed. Puts me off Monzo as a company, really (even more so than other actions in the past have already done)
I guess I’ll see how this place develops and the direction the community takes when it reopens
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THIS. All of this.
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Of course we do! Speaking personally, I like what the Monzo community is meant to be, but I’d love for it to be a kinder, more welcoming place. But that’s hard to achieve when those perpetuating that environment are doing so from leadership roles.
And that’s a shame, because the current state isn’t doing the brand image any favours at all.
I don’t think that’s right. I used to serve as a community manager a long time ago, and with the right mods taking the right approach, when we got it right, the only person who took offence was the person we were moderating against. We had some bad eggs, find me a community that doesn’t, but with a little bit of tact we managed to navigate it without irritating too many folk.
People can get frustrated in the heat of a moment, but it’s temporary and it subsides, and good folk often realise that with hindsight. When you’re perpetuating an environment that allows that frustration to fester, then I’m afraid to say your operation has a few bugs that need fixing. Else the environment I’m sure we all want the Monzo community will never happen.
Monzo have an image to protect as you rightly say. It’s time they started protecting it.
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Maybe I haven’t been around enough or maybe I was obvious to it, but I don’t match half of what’s being said with what goes on over there.
And this is from someone who has more flags than a vexillologist.
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I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that you can’t comment on those cases. So just have the threads closed quickly then? 
The are tools do deal with almost any example. But it feels like nobody at Monzo has any idea of how to use those tools, or how to empower people to ensure the tools are used properly.
One easy fix would be to send a bulk PM (it needs to be done with the API unless you want a group Discourse message) to all Trust Level 3 (and 4) members asking them to flag any topic where anyone asks about an account closure.
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People have some crazy perceptions
I’m not familiar enough with Discourse to know, but maybe some kind of plug-in exists that could scan posts for personal details and warn the user not to post them before actually publishing it?
Or even automatically redact details?
That would be a good idea, if possible, as otherwise users do seem to forget that they are publishing the data on the public internet (and I did see a few instances, especially since the experiments to reduce the “visibility”/availability of chat started, where users seemed to think that the Monzo Community actually was the support chat).
There is no way they have shut the forum because someone was bumping threads or criticising Monzo. There must be something more serious going on 🤷
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Hopefully this is what they’re using the downtime for to experiment with.
Absolutely - but often the criticism becomes personal and that isn’t acceptable. If criticism was always constructive and delivered in context then that wouldn’t be a problem. As I said above, some people struggle to recognise when their words become personal.
I find it difficult sometimes - it’s very easy to become emotional about it, especially if you feel that you’re in the right. It’s even harder when you see the behind the scenes and people don’t accept or believe what you’re saying.
As an example a lot of people accuse Monzo of virtue signalling, or being ‘woke’ for the PR.
Nothing could be further from the truth and people make those comments repeatedly without any evidence. I see, for want of a better phrase, the sausages being made and genuinely we want to be different. It’s very difficult for me to talk about examples from my specific role because of what I do, but recently we made a change in a process because it was unfair and not a proportional action to take for our customers. We’d been doing it wrong for a long time, and it wasn’t in the best interests of account holders.
I’d love to be able to talk about it - but I just can’t do so. It’s frustrating because it would be great to be transparent about it - but the default is to be transparent rather than be transparent.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to comment about Monzo specifics and I’ve been drawn into it, so I’m going to try avoiding commenting on any more specifics. It’s just hard when you’re so passionate about it (like I am) and also see the inside.
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I’m going to try and be careful how I phrase this (any mods reading please note I am NOT trying to attack @danw deliberately)
My view is, given what appears to me, to be, @danw defence of the Monzo Community management, you’re citing examples of things are perfectly acceptable such as shutting down account closure discussions and lumping them in the with the Coral Crews completely inexcusable abuse of the of their position.
As someone pointed out somewhere else here the so called trolls are the result of poor community management and if Monzo don’t fix that they may as well not bother re-opening the community at all
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I mean on the day it went into read-only mode there was the TESTING thread with someone making numerous attempts to run some sort of malicious code on the site. They tried to reset my forum password too…
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I really appreciate your perspective here, as much as it differs from mine. I know you can’t but I’d love if you were able to share more of the things we don’t see.
Are you not able to discuss the instances where Monzo get called out for virtue signalling? If more is going on behind the scenes that you could share, I’d love to hear them. Because from my perspective, quite a few of Monzo’s public facing actions do exhibit a hint of virtue signalling behind them. But Monzo aren’t alone in that.
I’ve said elsewhere, probably in this thread somewhere, that Apple strike a really good balance in their support of progressive movements. I think it’s because they’re a lot more open about their corporate culture, so it’s easy to see why they do what they do. Monzo replaced an app icon design that represented me with one that I feel excludes me, and they did a dreadful job of explaining why, and what that flag meant to them, and why they felt it was more appropriate to replace rather than be a new addition.
This stuff should probably belong in another thread tho.
FYI everyone: I’m using the 
reaction because my ability to 
Has been put on a crazy long cool down.
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I’m definitely guilty of sometimes becoming personal and not necessarily recognising it.
To try and keep it objective, I think we’ve seen plenty of examples of Monzo trying to be friendly, warm or appear hip and with the times; but missing the mark and making a complete mess of things.
There have been numerous examples on the Community and a couple of them in recent days here too. For example the message to the hard of hearing person from Twitter today. Without seeing what you see internally, I can only judge Monzo comms by the evidence I see, which is terrible copywriting, lots of emoji and perhaps sometimes not enough tact.
I’m not going to pass a judgement on whether this is appropriate for a bank, I’ll let everyone decide for themselves.
Regarding criticism, I don’t think the discussion in the thread about that blogpost was undesirable, and many people were in fact defending Monzo. Yet, as it’s an unfavourable article, it was Thanos snapped when the Community was locked. Unlike in previous instances, no commentary was even provided. Surely this is worse optics than rebutting then shutting the discussion, like with past threads? It makes it seem that Monzo have something to hide
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Fixed it @anon62949695
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Please don’t open the defrauded/frauded can of worms again 
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She’s another imposter! @anon85728687 Do you happen to dabble a lot in crypto and remind the Monzo forum of this regularly?
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