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Whether it's Greenspun or Spolsky, it's still explicitly described as "tricking" your users. It's sneaky and underhanded, and an incredibly bad way to treat you

Whether it's Greenspun or Spolsky, it's still explicitly described as "tricking" your users. It's sneaky and underhanded, and an incredibly bad way to treat your users.

blasdel 17y ago
And it's the sole moderation mechanism on Hacker News. Domain names get put on a big blacklist so that any posts linking to them get [dead]-ed instantly. It's used for outright spam, low content sites (Infoworld, for example), and purging people critical of YC companies (kungfugrippe.com was banned for mocking Scribd). It's totally the wrong solution for the first two problems, and unseemly for the last one. Users get hellbanned -- every link and comment they post is [dead]-ed instantly, but they see them normally when logged in as themselves. They're also disenfranchised -- they can vote and it's counted but doesn't affect the sums (this happens to normal users randomly too). Great users often get hellbanned over a brief spat concerning a narrow topic — instead of being told not to do that, or given a timeout, their contributions from then on are just blackholed. I occasionally see hellbanned users where paging back through their history reveals nothing worthy of moderation — though there are some cases where I know that the person is being banned simply for having been banned before (like Giles Bowkett's last several accounts). I make an effort to contact hellbanned users when I see them making substantive comments — make sure there's an address in the public part of your profile! I've sent around 10 such emails and a few github messages, it would be at least twice that if more people had contact info or used googleable usernames.
- 27182818284 17y ago
  I recall years ago a moderator at Fark.com describing what they called "ghost banning" which sounds a lot like the "hellbanned" you've described. The person would see their post in a thread but nobody else would.
  - evgen 17y ago
    This is fairly common on large forum sites. The last one I worked for would do this sort of invisible banning because it was pretty easy to put into code and was fairly effective. The banned users saw their posts and thought everything was fine, but probably wondered why their inflammatory comments were not attracting the sort of attention they sought. It tended to cut down on the number of new fake accounts these people would have otherwise created to get around the ban hammer.
    - markdennehy 17y ago
      So, screwing real users in order to avoid expending effort on spammers then. Yeah, still not liking this idea. It's basicly the forum software coders throwing their hands up and saying "Hey, we don't know how to solve this problem, so we give up. Screw you buddy!".
      - evgen 17y ago
        When creating a new account has no cost at all to the banned user then this is a useful response. Perhaps you have never tried to deter a determined troll or griefer on a forum, but it is a non-trivial exercise. It was not the coders admitting that they don't know how to solve the problem, it was the coders coming up with a solution that was effective for some large portion of the problem and that did not require too much additional code. They did not screw the real user, they just made them invisible. Eventually, when their posts did not get the replies they were looking for, they might just give up and go away -- this was the intent of the system.
        blasdel 17y ago
        It's a great tool for dealing with dedicated drive-by griefers, but that's not what most people deserving moderation are — they're usually just good new users figuring out the site norms, or old-timers having a bad day. I've noticed dozens of hellbanned users still posting on HN, and it was never the right treatment except for one of them (the losethos guy).
  - blasdel 17y ago
    SomethingAwful pioneered it, along with a lot of other dramatic moderatory practices ("User was banned for this post", Mods challenging users to do some trivial thing to get banned, bannings for "Mod-sass", etc.). But even for them it's a rarely (and specifically) used tool in a large suite of techniques: they give public timeouts and probations, bannings just cost another $10 to reactivate your account, permabannings mean you have to pay $10 for a new independent one. Hellbannings are for situations where the annoyance of the user's reaction far outweighs any interest from the community — the kind of crazy users who despite being uninvested in the community, will sue you over it and retain Orly Taitz.

Whether it's Greenspun or Spolsky, it's still explicitly described as "tricking" your users. It's sneaky and underhanded, and an incredibly bad way to treat your users.

blasdel 17y ago

And it's the sole moderation mechanism on Hacker News. Domain names get put on a big blacklist so that any posts linking to them get [dead]-ed instantly. It's used for outright spam, low content sites (Infoworld, for example), and purging people critical of YC companies (kungfugrippe.com was banned for mocking Scribd). It's totally the wrong solution for the first two problems, and unseemly for the last one. Users get hellbanned -- every link and comment they post is [dead]-ed instantly, but they see them normally when logged in as themselves. They're also disenfranchised -- they can vote and it's counted but doesn't affect the sums (this happens to normal users randomly too). Great users often get hellbanned over a brief spat concerning a narrow topic — instead of being told not to do that, or given a timeout, their contributions from then on are just blackholed. I occasionally see hellbanned users where paging back through their history reveals nothing worthy of moderation — though there are some cases where I know that the person is being banned simply for having been banned before (like Giles Bowkett's last several accounts). I make an effort to contact hellbanned users when I see them making substantive comments — make sure there's an address in the public part of your profile! I've sent around 10 such emails and a few github messages, it would be at least twice that if more people had contact info or used googleable usernames.

27182818284 17y ago
I recall years ago a moderator at Fark.com describing what they called "ghost banning" which sounds a lot like the "hellbanned" you've described. The person would see their post in a thread but nobody else would.
- evgen 17y ago
  This is fairly common on large forum sites. The last one I worked for would do this sort of invisible banning because it was pretty easy to put into code and was fairly effective. The banned users saw their posts and thought everything was fine, but probably wondered why their inflammatory comments were not attracting the sort of attention they sought. It tended to cut down on the number of new fake accounts these people would have otherwise created to get around the ban hammer.
  - markdennehy 17y ago
    So, screwing real users in order to avoid expending effort on spammers then. Yeah, still not liking this idea. It's basicly the forum software coders throwing their hands up and saying "Hey, we don't know how to solve this problem, so we give up. Screw you buddy!".
    - evgen 17y ago
      When creating a new account has no cost at all to the banned user then this is a useful response. Perhaps you have never tried to deter a determined troll or griefer on a forum, but it is a non-trivial exercise. It was not the coders admitting that they don't know how to solve the problem, it was the coders coming up with a solution that was effective for some large portion of the problem and that did not require too much additional code. They did not screw the real user, they just made them invisible. Eventually, when their posts did not get the replies they were looking for, they might just give up and go away -- this was the intent of the system.
      - blasdel 17y ago
        It's a great tool for dealing with dedicated drive-by griefers, but that's not what most people deserving moderation are — they're usually just good new users figuring out the site norms, or old-timers having a bad day. I've noticed dozens of hellbanned users still posting on HN, and it was never the right treatment except for one of them (the losethos guy).
- blasdel 17y ago
  SomethingAwful pioneered it, along with a lot of other dramatic moderatory practices ("User was banned for this post", Mods challenging users to do some trivial thing to get banned, bannings for "Mod-sass", etc.). But even for them it's a rarely (and specifically) used tool in a large suite of techniques: they give public timeouts and probations, bannings just cost another $10 to reactivate your account, permabannings mean you have to pay $10 for a new independent one. Hellbannings are for situations where the annoyance of the user's reaction far outweighs any interest from the community — the kind of crazy users who despite being uninvested in the community, will sue you over it and retain Orly Taitz.