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WTF is hellban... and if there are rules here where are they?

2 points by tonetheman ↗ HN
I was trying to read another article on the lavabit story. (See this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6190620)

And then the thread degraded into some talk on hellban. I tried to follow along but it appears that there are rules or maybe people who have been here longer are treated differently?

All I really wanted to do was read about the lavabit story and I end up more pissed about comments being deleted...

I found these guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) but there is no mentions of bans...

thanks ahead of time

4 comments

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ColinWright
In short, a hell-ban means things look normal to you, but everything you do is effectively ignored by the site. You can see if you're hell-banned by posting a comment, logging out, and seeing if the comment is visible. If not, you're probably hell-banned.

The merits and otherwise are discussed extensively elsewhere. Some will maintain that it's an effective method of fighting trolls. If they know they're banned they just abandon the account, re-register, and continue trolling. Others say that the price is too high, and that everything should be completely transparent - there just must be some other way of dealing with trolls.

The triggers for being hell-banned here on HN are not public, but are probably related to getting a large number of flags in a short time. Flags should only be used for material that doesn't belong here, so getting lots of them can trigger a blanket ban. There is no information about how automated the process is, but given that PG is a hacker at heart, and given the number of registered users on HN, I'd be surprised if it's not mostly, if not entirely, automated.

If you think you are inappropriately hell-banned, email pg and ask to be reinstated. My experience of similar issues is that very short emails get swift replies.