Silently banned from Reddit... | Hacker News Reader

Silently banned from Reddit...

stochasticgeometry.ie

4 pointsmarkdennehy9 comments

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=...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!".

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.

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).

SomethingAwful pioneered it, along with a lot of other dramatic moderatory practices ("User was banned for this post", Mods challenging users to do some trivial thing to get banned, bannings for "Mod-sass", etc.).

But even for them it's a rarely (and specifically) used tool in a large suite of techniques: they give public timeouts and probations, bannings just cost another $10 to reactivate your account, permabannings mean you have to pay $10 for a new independent one. Hellbannings are for situations where the annoyance of the user's reaction far outweighs any interest from the community — the kind of crazy users who despite being uninvested in the community, will sue you over it and retain Orly Taitz.

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