There are also accounts that have their comments show up just fine, but all their submits get "hell banned"... That is, you think your submit is shown on the ne

There are also accounts that have their comments show up just fine, but all their submits get "hell banned"... That is, you think your submit is shown on the new page, but it's really "[dead]" and you can't see that unless you have "show dead" turned on. Are you sure that that kind of autokilling is by user, rather than by site submitted? There are quite a few story source sites that are autokilled on submission because experience has shown that those sites consistently produce blogspam, political rants, or other kinds of stories that violate the Hacker News guidelines. It may be that some users have preferences in what they submit that happen to coincide with sites that are on the Hacker News autokill-on-submission list. Or it may be, as you surmise, that some users have a partial hellban that allows them to comment but not to submit new stories. You asked us to look at your own submissions list http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=powertower http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=powertower for an example, and it may be that your submission history was evaluated (algorithmically?) as a submission history that makes it more likely than not that any of your newer submissions would be off-topic or otherwise contrary to the HN guidelines. Over the years, I've observed some users become very astute at submitting that which is well liked here, and they don't have any problems making new submissions. I'm glad I saw your comment, as this is an interesting meta-question. AFTER EDIT: It occurs to me, while we are in a thread engaged in meta-discussion of HN moderation, that I would like to know why one of the recent submissions I made http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tokenadult http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tokenadult is dead. If I remember correctly, the link was live as I submitted it (in other words, it wasn't autokilled), and yet a while later I looked for it, and saw that it was dead (as I too have showdead turned on in my user settings). I'm not sure why that happened. The last time I had a submission, from a source that I was sure was an acceptable source for HN, autokilled, I asked pg about it by email, and his response was that a text string in the URL tripped a spam detection algorithm. That submission was restored to life, but by then the submission had sunk out of view on the new page, so there was never any discussion of that submission here.