Not cool, Reddit
stochasticgeometry.ie
stochasticgeometry.ie
Reddit does do 'shadow-bans' in the case of egregious spammers. Moderators are soon going to be able to do temporary, sub-reddit specific shadowbans as well.
Looking at his account (http://www.reddit.com/user/MarkDennehy/submitted/), he looks like a spammer. He only submits links to his own sites, and rarely comments.
Scrolling down through his submission history, I can see (for the subreddits I moderate, such as /r/business), that his submissions have an incredibly high rate of spam-filter failure (meaning that they get caught by the automated spam filter and never shown.) This is because they look like spam.
The point of Reddit is to submit interesting and informative links, as well as participate in discourse; not repeatedly submit your own articles to as many subreddits as possible.
If you look like a spammer, and talk like a spammer... well....
Basically, guy got inexplicably banned from the site, and is having trouble getting back on.
My blog got banned from there too. I only posted links from my personal blog there and never participated in any other discussions, so that might be why.
But why the sneakiness? They could just be up-front about it.
You just ban them, and give them a notice saying "You're banned". What do you think they're going to do? They just change IP, register again, and carry on.
Now imagine that you hellban them. Or just start introducing errors and delays into their posting. What do you think they do? They carry on trolling, but no-one else is disturbed by it.
Most forum software has the notion of "Send to Coventry".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_to_Coventry
I send people to coventry when I feel that they are unlikely to change their behaviour were I to inform them that their behaviour is going to lead to a permaban.
Specifically, if people are spamming and trolling, they get sent there without notification. In my experience, any spammer or troll is simply going to redouble their efforts if they become aware that they're going to be banned... but if they think they are successfully spamming and trolling then they quietly move along.
The harder bit is determining whether a spammer or troll is a spammer or troll.
There are the obvious spammers (penis enlargement, viagra, etc) and obvious trolls (Slashdot has had some famous ones). But what of someone who wants to sell something and is just over-enthusiastic, and lacking in netiquette?
That's where it's harder, but once you get to a certain size and you're dealing with perhaps hundreds of reported posts per day, then you're quite likely to be more heavy-handed, and less polite when you're working your way through the backlog.
That's when you offend someone who actually would've reacted well to just being spoken to.
So that's the why... and the problem is probably more indicative of a stretched set of moderators.
The schoolyard kids are a lot less cowardly and passive aggressive than you.
Ostracism itself is not a passive aggressive act, it's blatant and obvious. (And in some cases, the silent treatment is considered a form of psychological abuse. http://www.google.com/search?q=silent+treatment+psychologica...)
But shadow banning is purposefully spiteful way to waste your contributors time and energy, precisely because it is not obvious.
And so, if you mistakenly shadow ban otherwise good users (and what test does not suffer from false positives) than you can truly have abused and damaged a member of your community.
It really isn't something you should take lightly as ha ha, I've sent them to Coventry.
It's your community to manage as you see fit, but I think a more ethical way to treat people is to specifically state straight out they've been banned.
Which is why I outlined that it's important to only apply shadow banning/send to coventry to those who are unambiguously going to redouble their efforts to spam and troll.
If in doubt, have a word with the person first.
In Dennehy's case, I would be annoyed with him as a blogwhore, but I wouldn't have classified him as a spammer as reddit did and defended.
Reddit and others defend it as "it works", that's an end justifies the means argument and mainly speaks to the woes of our mad skillz, not to the virtue of the method.
And since you do speak to the person first, there is no way I can have a problem with that.
I see a lot of unreasonable demands placed on moderators, and one of them is expecting unpaid people to sink their spare time into going out of the way to be supportive of presumptuous efforts to drum up free publicity on someone else's dime. Even if the person in question might respond well to being called out, it's unlikely that the moderators would come to see them as a spammer if there wasn't some sort of presumptuous effort to drum up free publicity going on.
EDIT: Arc seems to have eaten my <sarcasm> tags. Truly an inferior-lisp.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/bbc58/silently_b...
/snark
Look, there is a fine line between promoting your own articles (It's totally okay to link to your own stuff), and spamming.
Linking the same thing across a bunch of subreddits and having it receive no upvotes? That's spam.
The FAQs DO have a section on that:
"It's not strictly forbidden to submit a link to a site that you own or otherwise benefit from in some way, but you should sort of consider yourself on thin ice. So please pay careful attention to the rest of these bullet points" http://www.reddit.com/help/faq#Whatconstitutesspam
Plus lots of the posts had 0 points, so it seems pretty conclusive to me.
And arguing the "more or less karma points"... come on. Really??? So not only did OP not read the FAQs, he doesn't know how reddit works and how many accounts the average redditor has.