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.

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.

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.

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