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Comment by 27182818284 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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