Agreed, and also: total banning is on balance less effective than hellbanning, because it's obvious to a troll when they've been banned... and they immediately

Agreed, and also: total banning is on balance less effective than hellbanning, because it's obvious to a troll when they've been banned... and they immediately get a new username to start afresh (via a new IP if needed -- you don't have to be highly technical to know restarting your DSL router will often let you back into sites that banned your IP...). The whole point of hellbanning is that it's not immediately obvious to trolls that they have been banned at all; so they keep on trolling (in the hellbanned account) without troubling other readers. Obviously some trolls are clever enough to grok hellbanning, but it still weeds out quite a few. Total banning is simply whack-a-mole.