Smash hit

The truth of the matter is that conception, pregnancy, birth and parenting are frequently a shocking mixture of pain, elation, fear, uncertainty, contentment, isolation, sorrow and hysterical laughter in your kitchen, and Mumsnet provides a place where, 24 hours a day, someone of a like mind can offer you either some dark humour or a shoulder during a long dark night of the soul – whichever is the more useful to you.

Mumsnet’s official policy of not promoting any poster, however regular, to an editorial post, which would give them the power to delete any libellous post (only Roberts and Longton have this power), is a deliberate decision to keep this close sense of community. Roberts says: “I don’t want there to be any ‘us’ and ‘them’ – any cliques on the [message] board. We all have to be equal on there.” This principle, coupled with the popularity of Mumsnet – there are more than 20,000 posts a day – means that the site continues to be a massive responsibility for Roberts, who started paying herself a wage for running Mumsnet only last year. Libel laws mean that she and Longton are personally and legally responsible for almost everything posted on the site – as they found out to their cost last year, during Mumsnet’s most high-profile hour. After a number of critical posts on Mumsnet about controversial baby guru Gina Ford, culminating in one poster joking that Ford “straps babies onto rockets, and fires them into the Lebanon”, Ford felt compelled to sue the board. After protracted legal wranglings, Mumsnet eventually settled out of court with an apology to Ford.

The case – a pivotal moment for the Mumsnet community – contained a series of great ironies: not least that Ford used to be a regular poster on Mumsnet and her childcare manuals continue to be voted “top buys” by the website. While the Mumsnet community rallied round Roberts and Longton, Ford was perceived to be oversensitive and too keen to close down the website. Nearly a year later, there are now more Google searches conducted for “Mumsnet” than there are for “Gina Ford”.

The ultimate irony is that the poster who was responsible for the “rockets into Lebanon” comment – she goes under the name “Morningpaper” – is now the collator and editor of the Mumsnet Guide To series. In other words, a serious rival to Ford’s crown. “And you can all make as many jokes about me as you like,” she posted on the board the day the publishing deal was announced.

And those funny, bummy mums of Mumsnet did.

MUMSNET REGULARS

Cod: The semi-feral, always amusing alpha female of the board. She is a hardcore feminist with a “unique” typing style – most posts look liek thsi – and is an expert at putting the boot into pious posters who write things such as: “My child doesn’t even know what a television is! Or sugar!” She is also on a mission to identify the most effective lipglosses and moisturisers known to man. She once started an incredibly contentious thread entitled: “It’s really sad about these murders in Norfolk [sic], but every time they mention it, I can only think of Alan Partridge.”

Hunkermunker: A vocal champion of breast-feeding and an ardent campaigner against Nestlé over its sale of baby formula in the Third World. Became so addicted to Mumsnet at one point that she got Justine Roberts, the site’s co-founder, to block her – and then posted under another name. A reliably cutting voice should one of the Perpetually Recurring Arguments (“Stay-at-home mums v working mums”, “Can people with buggies park in the disabled parking bays in supermarkets?”) rekindle.

Aitch: “Always up for a ruck – er, I mean debate,” as fellow poster Littlelapin puts it, and a “mad Scot” to boot. She is one of Mumsnet’s more entertainingly acerbic posters. A proponent of baby-led weaning, Aitch is also, because of personal experience, adept at counselling those experiencing ectopic pregnancies. Her job as a TV critic means that she is quick at spotting new talking-point shows: she was the author of the thread, “This place is going to go apes*** when the Claire Verity show starts,” which proved to be wholly correct. (Following a Mumsnet campaign, Verity was subsequently revealed by The Times to have falsified her qualifications and hasn’t appeared on TV since.)

Littlelapin: A relative newcomer, but she has quickly established herself as the “boundless energy” and “tireless heart” of the message board. Sole organiser of the “A Mile in Memory” sponsored walk (www.fsid.org.uk/mile-memory.html), which raised more than £20,000 for SIDs research, in response to a cot death suffered by a fellow poster. “She’s a good egg – a military wife,” Roberts says. “She gets things done, and with an oddly innocent sense of humour.”

Morningpaper: As compiler of the Mumsnet weekly round-up and mail-out, she is responsible for setting the tone of Mumsnet. She shows a marked preference for a) hard news and proven fact in relation to important parenting issues, and b) disseminating the unique Mumsnet lexicon to as wide an audience as possible. Any future uptake by the public of the word “fanjo” – Mumsnet’s euphemism of choice for female genitalia – will be largely down to her determined efforts.

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