3 ms·

Dumb question. What exactly is the difference between a hell-banning and a normal banning?

• mbrubeck 17y ago
  Hellbanned users don't know they are banned. They still see their own posts and comments, but no one else does.
  • WilliamLP 17y ago
    That explains the cold chill I sometimes feel down my neck when browsing this site.
• blasdel 17y ago
  When you're hell-banned, you aren't notified of it, you can continue to post links and comments, but you're the only one that sees them normally -- they're deleted for everyone except logged-in users that have [showdead] turned on. It was pioneered by the goons at SomethingAwful for dealing with problem users in a particularly lulzy way. It is rather effective for drive-by trolls that would just create another account and amp things up if they knew. But even SomethingAwful, with the most deliberately lulz-stoking moderators on the web, uses other methods almost exclusively: probation, timeouts, and normal banning. news.arc is uniquely capricious in that hell-banning is the only method in use