Many years ago I was rate-limited to five comments a day on HN. It took me ages to figure out that this was a punishment and not a bug; the only indication I ha

Many years ago I was rate-limited to five comments a day on HN. It took me ages to figure out that this was a punishment and not a bug; the only indication I had was that comment number six would be rejected with a cryptic error after I wrote it out and hit Send. This was probably because I made some unnecessarily angry comments. Fair enough, that's on me and I would have tried to correct myself if I had been told. I finally reached out to HN support and got a very nice personal email telling me that there was no record of what I did to earn this punishment, but they'd lift it if I promised to behave myself and not do it again. I asked why I wasn't just told that in the first place, and was told that if I had been a deliberately malicious spammer/troll (which I clearly wasn't, whatever my mistakes) then the cryptic punishment would have discouraged me from making a sockpuppet account. So I promised to behave in the future, and received no response and no lifting of the ban. Maybe they lost my email. I honestly don't know if the ban is still in place; I got frustrated and mostly stopped reading HN, so mission accomplished, I guess. Edit: Nope, it is. Just hit it now.