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Comment by symkat | Hacker News Reader

One problem I've found with banning: the rare troll on things like IRC who will take the act of banning as an act of agression and engagement in a war of "how many of my IPs can you ban while I harass your channel."

Those same people, ignored or hugged will often just find harassing your channel boring and move on.

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I agree. Different communication mediums require different tactics. In the case of IRC though, I think it's due to a lack of good banning tools.

One of the reasons I love Freenode is because they have good banning tools. For example, /mode #channel_under_attack +r will prevent people from joining if they aren't identified with nickserv. Once the attacker gets bored, you can remove the restriction.

> Those same people, ignored or hugged will often just find harassing your channel boring and move on.

I wonder if an "invisible ban" would work with trolls? What I mean is that their messages appear to them, butr not to any other user. So the troll isn't aware they've been banned. Has anyone used this?

Invisible bans only work so well; trolls figure it out pretty quick. I've used it on forums.

I run an active forum and the best tool has been to automatically compare the IP addresses of banned users (registration IP and all post IPs) against any future registration/post IP addresses and disable the subject when a match is found.

Trolls will eventually forget to use a proxy and will immediately find themselves autobanned again. And all the IPs they used are added to the blacklist.

It's pretty funny. My forum would've been unmanageable without this.

This of course also punish innocent users on the same set of dynamic IPs that the troll uses.

That would be a problem for a forum with a huge audience, but if there are only a few hundred active users, the probability of punishing the wrong person should be acceptably low.

The script publishes a message in a Moderator-only subforum that looks something like "Troll555 appears to be evading his ban on usernames: TrollMan, TrollDude, TrollSmith."

A few thousand members log in every day and I've rarely had a problem.

You'd think that, except invisible banning is used on hacker news and if you turn show-dead on in your profile and then go to the profile of someone who is 'dead' then you'll more than likely see months and months of them posting as an invisible person.

Those who stay on a hellbanned account tend to be the moderately clueless who got a false positive hellban after a tone-deaf first comment rather than trolls.

There's a variant on the hellban where you hide them but show their posts to other hellbanned people to them means they might get counter-flamed and think they're still posting for real.

That's a neat idea.

But it worked wonderfully on me. I kept using my account[1] for a whole month before noticing 2 days ago, and finding the cause[2] yesterday. My second account, altran, got killed on the 1st submission. This is my 3rd account.

  [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ranit8
  [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3903705

"hell bans" are described by CodingHorror.

Try turning "showdead" on (in your profile) - you'll start to see a few people who have been hellbanned. Some of those people know that but continue posting anyway. Some of those people just made a mistake and got hellbanned and could probably be unbanned.

This is done very poorly here on HN. I got hellbanned on my first account. I have no idea why, and there was no warning of any kind. I have not changed my behaviour in any way as a result, I simply made a new account. I don't see how that helps the quality of discourse. Hell banning needs to be restricted to people who are obviously just being offensive for the sake of offensiveness. People who may be just trying to contribute but break some un-spoken rule should be warned that what they are doing isn't acceptable, otherwise they have no way to adjust their behaviour.

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