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Comment by nathancahill | Hacker News Reader

Mandatum, if you see this, you're hellbanned. Since I can't reply to your comment about many apps like this not working in Firefox, this particular tool does work for me in the latest build.

I agree that many cutting-edge browser apps work in Chrome and not Firefox. Is it a case of browser specific syntax that people default to webkit for?

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This site needs a solution to bad commenters that doesn't result in discordant comments like this.

It might have worked? He was just un-hellbanned.

Welcome back into the land of the living, Mandatum!

Until the next time...

Seriously. Hellbanning is the worst part of hacker news.

Did Mandatum get hellbanned for saying that the app doesn't work on Firefox?

It's hard to say, it might have been from his first comment, a year and a half ago: "Seriously?" [0]

Poor guy has been posting decent comments since then, probably wondering why no-one replies.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4144856

Ah, that makes sense.

Poor guy.

The hellbanning system on ycombinator is terrible. Hellbanning should be reserved for the most obnoxious of spammers, not for random innocents.

is it that bad? A lot of people enable the option to see ghost comments. And then act when needed. It's called auto-moderation and it does seem to work.

It works, but not well.

Case in point: It took 18 months for this user to be discovered.

Or it should be able to be lifted if their comments get enough upvotes from people that have showdead enabled.

it's a nice idea but susceptible to people making their own vote rings to unban themselves

Why would they bother? The point of hellbanning is to stop people who don't realise nobody is seeing their comments, if they realise it then they'd just create a new account rather than a vote ring.

It's far easier to just logout, and create a new account.

I remember on some HN thread about 6 months ago that pg acknowledged that hellbanning is not always ideal, but he said that he didn’t have time to spare to implement any alternative form of banning in the software. And HN is not open-source, so if pg doesn’t have time to write the feature, there’s nothing anyone else can do to help.

I don't think so. It did sound like that at first then I realized he meant since he couldn't reply to Mandatum, Mandatum must be hellbanned.

they should use https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/source/browse/stable/sample... to make it work for both browsers.

I would like to request a hellban for my account, please? I think it's what I've wanted from this site all along, to be able to feel like I've address this sad group of over-engineering fools without the social consequences.

Please don't upvote me you complicit fucks, I meant it.

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