

Ask HN: What does [dead] mean and few more  - gamebit07

I have a hacker friend, who tried posting stuff on hacker news, it would show to him as posted but would not appear for others to see.(He would send me a link with item it, which i wont be able to open) After some time it would have [dead] marked befor it. Also his username appears in green.<p>So why do we see the following three things:
1.he posted a message and shared link with me http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3782888 he was able to see it, but i was not.<p>2. Why/How does [dead] appear before a post?<p>3. Why do few of the users have their usernames in green?<p>I like my friend are new over here, hence the question.<p>Thanks!
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chaosprophet
1\. He was hellbanned. It's an anti troll mechanism, which used to be quite
effective, but now has a lot of false positives, esp since it can be triggered
by an unpopular comment by a user with a low karma score.

2.[Dead] appears before a post if the item has been flagged by a lot of people
or has been killed by moderators. Also occurs when a hellbanned user posts
anything.

3\. Usernames in green is to indicate that the user is new - or atleast that's
what I think it is for.

------
anthonyb
It means that you've been "hellbanned". It's in theory reserved for trolls and
other zero-value posters, but often it catches new posters when their karma
drops below zero (I think that triggers an automatic hellban, but I'm not
sure).

I don't agree with it personally - it seems to catch a lot more people than
just the trolls.

~~~
chc
Eh, if you're new to a place and come in guns a-blazing or commenting on
worthless flamebait (which is generally what leads to your karma dropping
below zero), that is at least a very bad signal. I have seldom seen such a
person go on to be less hostile than they started out.

~~~
anthonyb
On the contrary, I've seen several people who post worthwhile things -
definitely not trolling - but happen to have a few people downvote them and
then get auto-hellbanned for no reason.

The latest one that I've seen is this guy:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dailyllama> He was hellbanned after
one of his first three posts, none of which look trollish to me. Are you
really saying that he will never produce anything worthwhile in his entire
existence?

Update: There are other cases where people have been hellbanned over trivia:
CPlatypus (<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=CPlatypus>) seems to be
exactly the sort of person that HN should be attracting. Read through his
comments - experienced dev, multiple start ups, knows what he's talking about,
but appears to have been hellbanned over this exchange:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732360>

