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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how that page doesn't cover shadow muting. If too many of your comments hit -4 in too short a time period you'll get nothing but "you're posting too fast" messages for several hours, possibly a day.

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You get this regardless of score I think. I was excitedly posting on a Dune thread the other day with all comments +4 and still got told to settle down lol.

Mine were spaced over an entire day. They just happened to be consecutively downvoted.

I have found when your account goes into this "you're posting too fast" purgatory, you can't post more than (I think) five times in some time period (12 hours?? not sure). My account somehow always ends up in this purgatory. It seems like something automatic triggers it and then you have to always E-mail them to get out of it, so I don't even bother anymore.

It's not automatic, it's manual. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. If you keep experiencing this after you emailed us to remove the limit, it must mean that you reverted to posting low-quality comments or (more likely) getting involved in flamewars. Or at least a mod saw it that way.

Interesting, thanks for the explanation. I'd argue that since there is no notice and no feedback as to which particular comment(s) triggered the action, then it may as well be automatic. I've kind of just learned to live with the limit, as I find it a little distasteful to have to keep E-mailing to justify myself, when I don't know what, in particular, got me into the state I need to justify myself out of.

Perhaps the purgatory state could expire after some fixed (weeks, months) cool-down period, I don't know. Just a suggestion.

I got good results from paying attention to what topics are particularly sensitive in the HN community and just not commenting on them.

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