I started a neighbourhood on Nextdoor…
I started a neighbourhood on Nextdoor and we gathered 4 Lead Persons. We joined with another neighbouring group and all was fine.
A lady from the neighbouring group resented my posts it seemed and she made many reports that were silly. eg "Over-Posting" because I posted an article or conversation starter every few days? For five days she posted on every post possible, going back for months in a way that was classed as uncivil.
Finally we had her blocked when she attacked the local Lead as well for her neighbourhood.
Nextdoor has no direct phone number so all contact is via email and it took some hours and up to days to get responses to our pleas for Nextdoor to step in and remove the woman from the group.
We wrote on multiple occasions about the lady's bad behaviour. I started a private "Difficult Topics" group and asked her to post there instead of on the main feed. I wrote to her privately. I sent her the copy of the community guidelines. As a Lead I could not leave her comments on the general feed. They were offensive. The woman ignored all and argued incessantly.
Finally after the lady was blocked her partner came online and took up where she had left off. I wrote a blunt warning about the two people on the private Leads Nearby message group.
A couple of days further on again after every post had been bombed by the man, with equally silly accusations being made, I was suddenly blocked from the site. I had been given NO warning, NO right of explanation to nextdoor...as a Lead I was simply told that "your account has been suspended for breaching guidelines, with the advice to be helpful not hurtful.
That was the end of a long line of pleading appeals from me and other Leads, for timely intervention from Nextdoor. I had already had to write as one other Lead sent copies of the reports that the man had made against me....because I could not access them. Somehow as a Lead I could not access reports made against somebody in my community...let alone when those reports concerned me directly...so I had no way of explaining from inside the app itself.
My only recourse was to send messages via email and then I had to wait while the offending members ran roughshod over the site with commentary.
I had not been very happy already with the app itself as it had not sent out invitations to neighbours as it had originally promised to do. I got a message that said effectively, "Nextdoor no longer sends mailed invitations". So half our neighbourhood could not be personally invited. That policy seemed to change after a few months and then I requested invitations to be sent...and finally they might have been but I got no confirmation about that at all.
The site itself is "clunky" to use and people wrote and complained to me that they had stopped using the site as they were getting too many notifications. I even wrote in a special group, "How to Manage Notifications" etc. to try to stop people from "walking away" and not engaging.
Nextdoor app also seems to bring old messages and posts up if a new comment is left...so when any member opened the site we could be hit with a post that was months old...and there was no clear reason why it had come to the top of the posts. It looked "tired and old". That was not helped by an awkward system to understand, with some posts on update, some on our neighbourhood, some on Nextdoor generally. It was "all over the place" and our members commented that they thought that Facebook was far easier to use and they asked us to go there instead.
I found generally that Nextdoor did not support its Leads, if they had to face difficult members. The guidelines are very wide and the recommended ways of dealing to step in and lead properly, can wind a Lead up to being suspended.
All up I found on hearing feedback that others disliked using the app. as I did. People had finally blocked all notifications and so they had not been reading the site at all. There were so many "rules and warnings" to comply with that it was not an enjoyable experience visiting the site, or trying to post, members said anfd I agreed. I had found the same.
But the final straw for me was when as a Lead I was not even asked about the validity of a post that I did not make publicly at all in my own recall...and I wanted to ask why any member could access the Leads Forum at all. It was meant to be a private space where confidential matters could be discussed. That did not appear to be the case but I am still waiting for confirmation from Nextdoor on that point.
If I were trying to set a neighbourhood group up again I would steer clear of Nextdoor totally. It lacks timely responses that Leads often require. However most of all I disagreed with the decisions and how they were made, when I was expected to try to mange the site. It had one good feature, that all members had to be proven to be local residents. I thought that would help!