HN Explorer

Ask HN: shouldn't there be a way to undeadify users?

6 points by gommm ↗ HN
In HN, when a user is banned all his new comments are marked as dead and are invisible to most people... I understand the reason for this and I quite agree that it's a good way to fight spam.

But, often, I see comments marked as dead even though they contribute to the discussion and looking at the history of those users, they sometimes have left interesting comments for the past year without realizing that no one could read them...

So, could there maybe be a way to guard against this? Maybe a link to undeadify a comment that marks up the banned user for review? Because I'm quite sure we lose quality conversation from that and that's a pity...

This rant was triggered by seeing the dead comment from jaiwithani...

7 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 34.4 ms ] thread
barry-cotter
There is. If they notice they can email pg. If they don't notice they're not going to be contributing to the conversation anyway.
gommm
Well I'd agree with you, but I know that some people I've contacted in the past didn't know that HN did that and they just were surprised that no one were responding to their comments...
jacquesm
I'm of two minds on this. For spammers I agree with the treatment, if a person is a long standing member of HN then I think some way of alerting them would be more appropriate than the current system.

PG does not like you alerting people on the site that they've been banned.

gommm
Same here, for spammers, of course I completely agree with the treatment... It's just that sometimes some long standing members are banned and there doesn't seem to be any reason for it...

I didn't know that PG didn't like us alerting people that they've been banned... Any reason for that?

jacquesm
I've received a rather pointy email from him asking me not to even discuss that this happens.

I think the reason is that there are a number of notorious trolls that still haven't figured out that they've been banned and that this might bring them to log out and check to see whether their posts are still visible.

It's called 'hell banning', and on other fora it is only applied to the worst cases, on HN it is the only way people get banned.

gommm
Well, that's really why if there was a way for the community to mark interesting comments from banned users (sort of like the flag/unflag thing), it would make it much easier to manage...

No need to point it out, just click on a link and if enough people think that the user shouldn't be banned, automatically unban him...

jacquesm
The only 'unban' here is to email PG, and I think he likes it that way, bans on HN of established users are rare enough that he can keep tabs on it.