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Ask HN: Are losing article flagging abilities permanent?

15 points by yareally ↗ HN
Just giving a fair warning to anyone that would want to flag all the repetitive stories of the past couple of days. If you do so more than a few times, you're likely to lose your ability to flag stories entirely. I just found that out the hard way myself. Does not matter if you're also up-voting unrelated stories at the same time, it will still take away your ability. I don't know if it's permanent or not, but hopefully it isn't.

Flag with caution everyone :)

8 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 32.4 ms ] thread
benologist
Yes. I lost mine a long, long time ago.
gexla
I seemed to be banned for a while. All my comments were appearing dead. I quit logging into HN for a couple of months and then my account went back to normal. So, it appears that some things may be permanent while other things may not be.
jerrya
Hey, it's not so bad, I was there for the great $rtbl meta-mod banning of 2002. http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=display&uid=442574&id=4236
mindcrime
More or less the same here. I made the mistake of upvoting something critical of the /. editors and lost my mod rights permanently. Not sure if mine was "The Post" mentioned there or not, but I definitely got $rtbl'd. :-(
jacquesm
Yep. It's funny because there was this explicit request to help flag stuff from 'noobstories' to get rid of undesirable content and I did my bit of community service and then some only to see my flagging privileges taken away.

I'm happy with it though, it saves me a lot of time.

gexla
That's what I thought about my commenting being killed off. Not that I flooded HN with comments, but a lot of my posts I put too much time into.

I would be happy if HN could somehow block me from being able to see the site at all. I know about the procrastination feature and other blocking tools, but while I admit I have a problem, I'm not willing to do anything about it. ;)

yareally
That's a good way to look at it. I feel a bit better about losing it after seeing that it even affects users that have been active on HN much longer than myself.
ScottWhigham
Happened to me as well. It's a fine policy, except when there's a major news story that has multiple facets. When the news starts coming in fast and thick, we community members who use the flag feature for reporting duplicate posts get punished. Hopefully pg will review this at a future date. But, like jacquesm said, it does save me time haha.