
Silently banned from Reddit... - markdennehy
http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2010/03/09/silently-banned-reddit/
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tokenadult
As a point of information, how many discussion forum websites ban some users
by giving them nontransparent ban messages (e.g., responses to server requests
that look like error messages rather than a statement that the user has been
banned)? Philip Greenspun advocated that a long time ago

[http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=...](http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=000teT)

(the link describes a twist on his practice, used by Joel Spolsky), but I
don't know how many site managers follow that suggestion.

~~~
markdennehy
Whether it's Greenspun or Spolsky, it's still explicitly described as
"tricking" your users. It's sneaky and underhanded, and an incredibly bad way
to treat your users.

~~~
blasdel
And it's the sole moderation mechanism on Hacker News.

Domain names get put on a big blacklist so that any posts linking to them get
[dead]-ed instantly. It's used for outright spam, low content sites
(Infoworld, for example), and purging people critical of YC companies
(kungfugrippe.com was banned for mocking Scribd). It's totally the wrong
solution for the first two problems, and unseemly for the last one.

Users get hellbanned -- every link and comment they post is [dead]-ed
instantly, but they see them normally when logged in as themselves. They're
also disenfranchised -- they can vote and it's counted but doesn't affect the
sums (this happens to normal users randomly too). Great users often get
hellbanned over a brief spat concerning a narrow topic — instead of being told
not to do that, or given a timeout, their contributions from then on are just
blackholed. I occasionally see hellbanned users where paging back through
their history reveals nothing worthy of moderation — though there are some
cases where I know that the person is being banned simply for having been
banned before (like Giles Bowkett's last several accounts).

I make an effort to contact hellbanned users when I see them making
substantive comments — make sure there's an address in the public part of your
profile! I've sent around 10 such emails and a few github messages, it would
be at least twice that if more people had contact info or used googleable
usernames.

~~~
27182818284
I recall years ago a moderator at Fark.com describing what they called "ghost
banning" which sounds a lot like the "hellbanned" you've described. The person
would see their post in a thread but nobody else would.

~~~
evgen
This is fairly common on large forum sites. The last one I worked for would do
this sort of invisible banning because it was pretty easy to put into code and
was fairly effective. The banned users saw their posts and thought everything
was fine, but probably wondered why their inflammatory comments were not
attracting the sort of attention they sought. It tended to cut down on the
number of new fake accounts these people would have otherwise created to get
around the ban hammer.

~~~
markdennehy
So, screwing real users in order to avoid expending effort on spammers then.
Yeah, still not liking this idea. It's basicly the forum software coders
throwing their hands up and saying "Hey, we don't know how to solve this
problem, so we give up. Screw you buddy!".

~~~
evgen
When creating a new account has no cost at all to the banned user then this is
a useful response. Perhaps you have never tried to deter a determined troll or
griefer on a forum, but it is a non-trivial exercise. It was not the coders
admitting that they don't know how to solve the problem, it was the coders
coming up with a solution that was effective for some large portion of the
problem and that did not require too much additional code.

They did not screw the real user, they just made them invisible. Eventually,
when their posts did not get the replies they were looking for, they might
just give up and go away -- this was the intent of the system.

~~~
blasdel
It's a great tool for dealing with dedicated drive-by griefers, but that's not
what most people deserving moderation are — they're usually just good new
users figuring out the site norms, or old-timers having a bad day.

I've noticed dozens of hellbanned users still posting on HN, and it was never
the right treatment except for one of them (the losethos guy).

