At some point, they will realize that this is happening, and there will be outrage when they communicate about it to their friends via an outside channel. Be prepared for a lot of splashback.
Make it a 85% hell ban - they will never figure out what happened, yet they will not be able to continue flaming.
I've thought about this, but it basically means I'm programming features for assholes. I don't want to get in a war like that, but I may have to, I guess.
HN is full of programming features for assholes, it seems to have served the community well, even if it isn't always 100% transparent and in the case of false positives it requires manual undoing.
That sounds interesting. Are those features in the public source code?
No, PG keeps a lot of the secret sauce out of the public release in order to make it a bit harder for those that want to game the system.
I love this concept; an alteration would be to instead change their background to care bears or barney, or something overly obnoxiously loving.
Hmm. Has anyone tried a purgatory ban (I just made that up). Basically give individual users the ability to never see posts or messages from other individual users, but no indication to the ban-ee.
I've done that. They figured it out and twas no fun. Don't fight with pigs, you'll just et dirty and they like it (or how does that saying go?)