bonch your account has been hellbanned. Looking at your comment history it has been for a while.
Update: Just to be clear, I don't mind hellbanning spammers or obvious trolls, but looking at bonch's comment history he/she doesn't seem to be either.
The only reason a hellbanned person can't tell he's been hellbanned is because he's logged on as himself. The reason others can tell is because they aren't logged on as him. The solution is obvious -- log off and visit HN anonymously.
It's quite a brilliant thing. The problem is mods are really abusing it here on HN (you should hallban seasoned trolls. Not someone that trolls once or twice in a year, or worse, someone who isn't even trolling but just said something stupid or out-of-place).
Isn't the point of this type of ban to avoid alerting the presumed troll in question?
I read with showdead, and have noticed we seem to often tell auto dead users about it, which seems to defeat the point. Perhaps I've misunderstood the whole idea.
A lot of HN users find the whole concept of hell banning objectionable. Because for a large number of those affected, they're not spammers or trolls, they've just made one comment that has irked an admin. It is our duty as decent human beings to inform them.
Precisely my biggest problem with HN. There needs to be a way to repeal HellBanning, some sort of an appeal mechanism or a time-based auto-repeal that kicks in after say 4 weeks of good behavior such as 25 upvoted (albeit dead) comments from the HBanned user.
Or the admins could just reserve hellbanning for only the most persistent serious trolls. It is a useful tool but should only be used in extreme circumstances, not just for one bad comment. If it was used only once a month or every few months for persistent trolls it wouldn't be a problem.
Bad comments get voted down anyway, so there's already a mechanism for that, IMHO hellbanning should really only be used on people trying to post spam repeatedly or repetitively troll comment threads.
Yes, when I saw that I could still upvote dead comments, I just assumed this data would be used that way -- otherwise what's the point in being able to do it?
that's by far worst case of that i've ever seen. is there some way we can report this and have it looked into? he shouldn't be banned, or should at least be given the respect of notification. it's been well over a year of constructive posts from that guy and nobody ever sees them. all from what looks like one snarky comment he made. that's not right.
Update: Just to be clear, I don't mind hellbanning spammers or obvious trolls, but looking at bonch's comment history he/she doesn't seem to be either.