EDIT: Replies in edit at the bottom - for some reason I'm unable to reply in the forum.

After years of productive and insightful conversation, it seems I was banned without notice from hacker news.

Presumably, this was because I used the 'f' word once. I had accumulated 2205 karma points, with an average of > 4 per post. I consider myself to be a productive member of the community. It appears someone did not.

Worse, this banning was done without any notification, and in the rather cowardly silent manner of making my posts visible only to me, rather than notifying me or providing me some sort indication. Further, no one objected to my use of the word, although some incorrectly concluded that I was taking the original post personally.

There does not appear to be any notification or process around banning. After wondering why reasonable questions and comments were not getting any replies, I checked to see if my posts were appearing and it seems they no longer are.

Oddly, the comment immediately prior to the one that seems to have provoked the "ban" was on handling trolls.

What's the recourse? How do such bans happen? How do you prevent the vast YC alumni network from having once overly sensitive person banning legitimate contributors they disagree with (since presumably they are the ones with this privilege)?

Judge for yourself:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aneth

And my most recent comments that are not visible:

I just heard of Unicorn / Rainbow as a way to get more out of Heroku workers/dynos. I wonder if this is also compatible, or a better alternative? I'm new to this whole concept, so am just about to get my feet wet. Hopefully, Heroku will implement something like this internally, as it seems it would help them to eliminate the greatest flaw with their system - that each deployment require 5-10 seconds of downtime as new dynos are started. -----

* 1 point by aneth 10 hours ago | link | parent | on: Matt Mullenweg: I’m Worried That Silicon Valley Mi...

Perhaps in order to resolve this ethical quandry, he should include customizable limiting features when notifications are implemented, much like HN has. This would be unusual in a consumer web product, and might be both a differentiating feature and good for PR. "bug me no more than once every 4 hours" might be a nice setting. -----

* 1 point by aneth 2 days ago | link | parent | on: Laravel : A New PHP Framework<p>If you want to create a new framework, why create it in PHP instead of switching to a language that is not deeply flawed? Any decision to use PHP on a green project seems to me the consequence of either technical decision making incompetence, or personal or organizational inertia, only the last of which is generally excusable. Using PHP otherwise seems like requiring your organization to use IE7 because you don't have the resources or energy to learn how to upgrade your infrastructure. At best it's a reasonable preservation of resource, but generally it's laziness. Learn something new and good - Ruby, Python, Java, Scala, C#, node, heck even Perl. I know I'll take hits for this, but seriously - how is continuing to use PHP any more justified than forcing old, flawed technologies like IE 7 unnecessarily on your organization? It's the same stubborn laziness and curmudgeonry - sticking to and forcing on others your bad status quo. PHP is better at nothing than alternatives (except introducing obscure bugs) and worse at so many things . -----

* 1 point by aneth 2 days ago | link | parent | on: The "bat signal" for the Internet

While I like the general idea.... "If you have a website, we'll send you sample alert code to get working in advance. The next time there's an emergency, we'll tell you and send new code." Am I the only one who finds this either unnecessarily complicated or technically incompetent? -----

1 point by aneth 4 days ago | link | parent | on: FCC: The Countdown to IPv6 is On

I'm not f...