HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why aren't users told when their HN accounts turn 'dead'

3 points by ljf ↗ HN
If you change your settings to 'show dead' you will find lots of comments from users who are totally unaware that their accounts are now 'dead'.

Dead accounts can still comment, but their comments can not be seen by most users, and cannot be upvoted. Since I started checking a few weeks ago, I've found about 100 people who were happily posting away, wondering why they never received any comments to their comment, or new karma, but happily taking part. Once told these users can usually search back through their comments to one heavily down-voted post that killed their who account.

I understand that users don't register with emails, but surely there could be some way of letting people know their account has been closed (and why), so that they know to modify their behavior.

Many of the dead comments are fine and on topic, and are written by people that want to be (and think they are still part of) the great community HN has here.

5 comments

[ 25.8 ms ] story [ 559 ms ] thread
kappaloris
I guess its a way to contain spam accounts. If you start banning those accounts, spambots will simply create new ones.
ljf
Maybe, but most of the spam seems to be new stories, not comment spam. In fact in the last few weeks I've yet to see a single spam comment (dead or alive).

A few dead comments were trolling, but the vast majority where good, on topic comments. Just seems sad to lose those users.

slig
Because that's how this type of ban works. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning
ljf
Indeed - it's just when i look back into 'dead' users comments, it's usually one final post (often about PC/Mac or Apple/Android) that 'closes' their account. These aren't persistent trolls usually, or argumentative people - sometimes it's a flippant remark, or an attempt at humor that gets them banned.
ohgodthecat3
It is pretty easy to notice when your account is hellbanned now as you are also slowbanned and it makes the site virtually unusable (waiting many seconds to minutes for each page to load).