5 ms·

Incidentally, nothing at all changed during this whole saga.

by pg 13y ago

sillysaurus2 13y ago
I'm a scientist at heart. I know how important it is to be very accurate. So I made sure to report exactly what I experienced. My home IP address is presently still banned (or at least the arc process is refusing to send data to it). I verified that it fails to load both in Chrome and Firefox, ruling out browser issues. When that happened, I started Tor browser and HN loaded fine. I logged in. It logged in fine. I continued using Tor for awhile. Then after about 30min, I changed Tor IPs and tried to log in. The login failed, redirecting me from /login to /null upon successfully entering my password. It continued to fail in that manner. I tested it from at least three different Tor circuits; probably five. I then created sillysaurus3 and made a comment here. You should be able to see that comment. The account was hellbanned very quickly; maybe instantly. Does using Tor get your account hellbanned? I then created "sillysaur" which I successfully made a comment with. I verified the comment wasn't hellbanned. Then I checked again 20min later and it was hellbanned. I tried logging into sillysaurus2 from about three or four different Tor circuits. All of them redirected me to /null and hence continued to deny me access. Then after an hour or so of continually checking it every 10min, it suddenly started accepting my login successfully and not redirecting me to /null. The only thing that changed on my end was my Tor circuit. I unbanned my IP using /unban. It reported "unbanned". That failed to have any effect. I am above all an honest researcher, and these are my honest and accurate experiences, so something very odd was happening Arc side. And I didn't do anything to trigger getting IP banned --- I use a private IP address and I don't run any crawler. From all of this, I infer it's not accurate to say that nothing changed.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Okay, for the record, no moderator took any action against me whatsoever. pg was absolutely correct. I experienced an incredible series of coincidences. Due to those coincidences, it seemed very much like I was being banned by a moderator. But it was just extraordinarily bad luck that I managed to run into each of those events. Here's what happened: Somehow, (and I still have no idea how), I did something to cause HN to blacklist my home IP address. But from my point of view, it appeared to me that I was IP banned in response to posting my original comment. But I wanted to be certain that it wasn't just a coincidence, so I tried logging in via Tor. I was able to login successfully for about 10 minutes. Then I restarted Tor, so I was assigned a new Tor IP address. I tried to login again, and that's when I experienced my first bad luck: that specific Tor IP triggered either a bug or a protection mechanism, resulting in HN failing to process my login request. (The login page redirected me to http://news.ycombinator.com/null http://news.ycombinator.com/null and silently ignored my login attempt.) I restarted Tor to get a new IP address and tried again. Same thing: even with the new ip addr, HN refused my login attempts. I restarted Tor yet again with the same result. So at that point I had tried to login with three different Tor IP addresses, and the login attempts failed all three times. So from my point of view, that seemed very much like a moderator was banning me. Then I created "sillysaurus3" which was instantly hellbanned. This was an automatic action, not a moderator action. (I assume it happened because a lot of spam originates via Tor.) So I tried again. I created "sillysaur" and posted a comment. I restarted Tor and verified that the comment was publicly visible (i.e. verified sillysaur was not hellbanned). Then I updated my sillysaurus2 profile to say "I've been banned, and my new account is sillysaur." Ten minutes later I checked sillysaur again and discovered that it had become hellbanned. So at that point it seemed reasonable to conclude that some moderator was actively banning me. But in reality no moderator had taken any action. It was just bad luck (somehow triggering the IP ban) followed by incredible bad luck (somehow running into the login bug / protection mechanism three times in a row from three different Tor IPs that all happened to trigger it) followed by even more bad luck (my new accounts created via Tor were automatically hellbanned, probably because spam was originating from those Tor IP addresses which I had been assigned). So that was a pretty crazy series of events, and I'm very sorry for scaring people with my warning. It was incorrect: no one had done anything, just as pg said.
  - AeroNotix 13y ago
    What an incredibly paranoid person you are. Good for you!
  - induscreep 13y ago
    I am a scientist too. Your thoroughness in troubleshooting is amazing. Excellent attention to detail.
    - datanotdata 13y ago
      But ultimately wrong.
  - pg 13y ago
    sillysaurus3 wasn't banned. We autokill comments from newly created accounts using Tor, but we don't do anything to the accounts themselves.
ibeenbanned 13y ago
> Incidentally, nothing at all changed during this whole saga. Well I for one wish you would change your hellbanning policy. It seems overly harsh...moderators have no problem hellbanning users with different political views, while letting others slide. It was (and remains) an interesting approach to the perennial problem of jerks posting jerk posts. But as it stands today it's (1) too harsh and (2) too subjective.

Incidentally, nothing at all changed during this whole saga.

by pg 13y ago

Incidentally, nothing at all changed during this whole saga.

I'm a scientist at heart. I know how important it is to be very accurate. So I made sure to report exactly what I experienced. My home IP address is presently still banned (or at least the arc process is refusing to send data to it). I verified that it fails to load both in Chrome and Firefox, ruling out browser issues. When that happened, I started Tor browser and HN loaded fine. I logged in. It logged in fine. I continued using Tor for awhile. Then after about 30min, I changed Tor IPs and tried to log in. The login failed, redirecting me from /login to /null upon successfully entering my password. It continued to fail in that manner. I tested it from at least three different Tor circuits; probably five. I then created sillysaurus3 and made a comment here. You should be able to see that comment. The account was hellbanned very quickly; maybe instantly. Does using Tor get your account hellbanned? I then created "sillysaur" which I successfully made a comment with. I verified the comment wasn't hellbanned. Then I checked again 20min later and it was hellbanned. I tried logging into sillysaurus2 from about three or four different Tor circuits. All of them redirected me to /null and hence continued to deny me access. Then after an hour or so of continually checking it every 10min, it suddenly started accepting my login successfully and not redirecting me to /null. The only thing that changed on my end was my Tor circuit. I unbanned my IP using /unban. It reported "unbanned". That failed to have any effect. I am above all an honest researcher, and these are my honest and accurate experiences, so something very odd was happening Arc side. And I didn't do anything to trigger getting IP banned --- I use a private IP address and I don't run any crawler. From all of this, I infer it's not accurate to say that nothing changed.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
Okay, for the record, no moderator took any action against me whatsoever. pg was absolutely correct. I experienced an incredible series of coincidences. Due to those coincidences, it seemed very much like I was being banned by a moderator. But it was just extraordinarily bad luck that I managed to run into each of those events. Here's what happened: Somehow, (and I still have no idea how), I did something to cause HN to blacklist my home IP address. But from my point of view, it appeared to me that I was IP banned in response to posting my original comment. But I wanted to be certain that it wasn't just a coincidence, so I tried logging in via Tor. I was able to login successfully for about 10 minutes. Then I restarted Tor, so I was assigned a new Tor IP address. I tried to login again, and that's when I experienced my first bad luck: that specific Tor IP triggered either a bug or a protection mechanism, resulting in HN failing to process my login request. (The login page redirected me to http://news.ycombinator.com/null http://news.ycombinator.com/null and silently ignored my login attempt.) I restarted Tor to get a new IP address and tried again. Same thing: even with the new ip addr, HN refused my login attempts. I restarted Tor yet again with the same result. So at that point I had tried to login with three different Tor IP addresses, and the login attempts failed all three times. So from my point of view, that seemed very much like a moderator was banning me. Then I created "sillysaurus3" which was instantly hellbanned. This was an automatic action, not a moderator action. (I assume it happened because a lot of spam originates via Tor.) So I tried again. I created "sillysaur" and posted a comment. I restarted Tor and verified that the comment was publicly visible (i.e. verified sillysaur was not hellbanned). Then I updated my sillysaurus2 profile to say "I've been banned, and my new account is sillysaur." Ten minutes later I checked sillysaur again and discovered that it had become hellbanned. So at that point it seemed reasonable to conclude that some moderator was actively banning me. But in reality no moderator had taken any action. It was just bad luck (somehow triggering the IP ban) followed by incredible bad luck (somehow running into the login bug / protection mechanism three times in a row from three different Tor IPs that all happened to trigger it) followed by even more bad luck (my new accounts created via Tor were automatically hellbanned, probably because spam was originating from those Tor IP addresses which I had been assigned). So that was a pretty crazy series of events, and I'm very sorry for scaring people with my warning. It was incorrect: no one had done anything, just as pg said.
- AeroNotix 13y ago
  What an incredibly paranoid person you are. Good for you!
- induscreep 13y ago
  I am a scientist too. Your thoroughness in troubleshooting is amazing. Excellent attention to detail.
  - datanotdata 13y ago
    But ultimately wrong.
- pg 13y ago
  sillysaurus3 wasn't banned. We autokill comments from newly created accounts using Tor, but we don't do anything to the accounts themselves.

ibeenbanned 13y ago

> Incidentally, nothing at all changed during this whole saga. Well I for one wish you would change your hellbanning policy. It seems overly harsh...moderators have no problem hellbanning users with different political views, while letting others slide. It was (and remains) an interesting approach to the perennial problem of jerks posting jerk posts. But as it stands today it's (1) too harsh and (2) too subjective.