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Hi guys (and girls),
I'm a tiny hidden lurker of this community, and one thing that seems (to me) amazing is the effort put by moderators by managing the community via warnings/bans.
I'm also a huge nerd and I read CodeHorror often. And the other day this post was published in there, about managing online communities: Suspension, ban or hellban?
I found the idea interesting, specially this bit:
A hellbanned user is invisible to all other users, but crucially, not himself. From their perspective, they are participating normally in the community but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer disrupt the community because they are effectively a ghost. It's a clever way of enforcing the "don't feed the troll" rule in the community. When nothing they post ever gets a response, a hellbanned user is likely to get bored or frustrated and leave. I believe it, too; if I learned anything from reading The Great Brain as a child, it's that the silent treatment is the cruelest punishment of them all.
(There is one additional form of hellbanning that I feel compelled to mention because it is particularly cruel – when hellbanned users can see only themselves and other hellbanned users. Brrr. I'm pretty sure Dante wrote a chapter about that, somewhere.)
Now, I know that the bans thread is one of the more popular in this site (for good reasons), but I had a mental image of a thread picturing the conversation of all hellbanned users amongst themselves and... well... joy and crisps 
So, knowing that there is little to no chance that this will be really adopted as the current system works, let's do a "theorycrafting" exercise: what are your thoughts on it? Do you believe it would be a better way to police the site and would leave more time for admins to write more of their awesome reports? Or it would not be such a good idea? Why? Would you use it on your site?
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I don't see the upside of hellbanning someone instead of simply banning them. 
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Germany2896 Posts
Once users know that such a feature exists they'll simply check if their posts are visible as a guest(using a different IP obviously). So I'm not sure how useful it is.
Schnake:
The idea is that they don't notice they're banned and thus make no new account to continue their bad posting.
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Hm I can't remember the last time one of my posts got a response... I'm already hellbanned!
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That hellban sounds silly.
Let the banned users use the sites resources for no gain really?
They'll realize they are banned and nobody sees their posts and just make a new account.
Also there already is the TL version which is talk to stimey.
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South Africa4316 Posts
I really dislike the idea of hellbanning. It seems like a cowardly response to bad behaviour with no reasonable chance for users to redeem themselves. One of the reasons we give out temp-bans is to teach users where the line is. It's a strong reprimand which will hopefully lead to improved posting. Even users who get permanently banned are allowed to make a new account after a reasonable period of time has passed. Users who get banned know that they have made a mistake, and will hopefully stop making that mistake. In contrast, users who get hellbanned are not informed that they have been punished. They get excluded from the community without being given an opportunity to improve their posting. If you get hellbanned and ignored, you won't make a new account to improve your posting, you'll simply lose interest and leave.
Like I say, it seems really cowardly to me. It's moderating without taking responsibility for your moderator's decisions. I don't like it.
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On June 08 2011 20:11 Schnake wrote:I don't see the upside of hellbanning someone instead of simply banning them.
Adds a little cruelty to the ban hammer for the guys who are complete tools.
I like it
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The upside is that if there are not aware of the hellban policy there is less chance that they will try to make another account to circumvent a ban. One of the big downside I see is that it doesn't allow the education of posters.
Especially if hellbanned can see themselves, you'll have some kind of parallel hell forum going ape shit, wasting ressources for nothing.
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Hellbanning sounds funny. Seen many people who deserves it for sure : p
Don't think TL will adopt this though!
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I think that's a pretty interesting idea However, I dunno what would stop people from just making new accounts again after finding out they've been hellbanned.
The second idea is pretty funny to think about. I just think of a big timeout room filled with trolls and flammers. That's like the equivalent to the 8th and 9th circles of hell combined.
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Cute idea. Kinda like zeppelins filled with hydrogen. It sounds great until you look back with the hindsight that things can go terribly terribly wrong.
Real response: A small selection of banned users would be upset by this enough to change their attitude or change their posting habits but the majority of banned users will learn or go away. This might be a nice approach if you could blanket an IP with hellbanned so PBUs would never be a problem again. But again, the system seems to work fine as it is.
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Would it be feasible? or could only a wizard do it?
I guess it'd take a pretty severe offense to get a hellban. Maybe a level above a permaban? but if you're already going to permaban someone, then why have a hellban?
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Or maybe...we have all allready been hellbanned. Some serious sixth sense stuff going on here.
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On June 08 2011 20:07 arak wrote:Hi guys (and girls), I'm a tiny hidden lurker of this community, and one thing that seems (to me) amazing is the effort put by moderators by managing the community via warnings/bans. I'm also a huge nerd and I read CodeHorror often. And the other day this post was published in there, about managing online communities: Suspension, ban or hellban?I found the idea interesting, specially this bit: Show nested quote +A hellbanned user is invisible to all other users, but crucially, not himself. From their perspective, they are participating normally in the community but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer disrupt the community because they are effectively a ghost. It's a clever way of enforcing the "don't feed the troll" rule in the community. When nothing they post ever gets a response, a hellbanned user is likely to get bored or frustrated and leave. I believe it, too; if I learned anything from reading The Great Brain as a child, it's that the silent treatment is the cruelest punishment of them all. Show nested quote +(There is one additional form of hellbanning that I feel compelled to mention because it is particularly cruel – when hellbanned users can see only themselves and other hellbanned users. Brrr. I'm pretty sure Dante wrote a chapter about that, somewhere.) Now, I know that the bans thread is one of the more popular in this site (for good reasons), but I had a mental image of a thread picturing the conversation of all hellbanned users amongst themselves and... well... joy and crisps So, knowing that there is little to no chance that this will be really adopted as the current system works, let's do a "theorycrafting" exercise: what are your thoughts on it? Do you believe it would be a better way to police the site and would leave more time for admins to write more of their awesome reports? Or it would not be such a good idea? Why? Would you use it on your site?
I've actually been 'hellbanned' before from a site. If you get banned in this way, it's not that hard to spot (because if you happen to browse the site anonymously from a different IP, you spot that your posts are missing). To this day I have no idea why it happened, and I don't think I was ever a bad user of the site.
When I queried my ban over one nuked post that I'd spotted, the moderator (to name names, it was Pam Jones at groklaw.net; groklaw is now under new management, and I've no idea if the policy still carries on) said that the particular post had been flagged by her underlings and that on reflection the post was a good one, and would be reinstated. However, I actually did a little digging, and discovered that about six months worth of posts had been hidden in this way. When I queried PJ about it, I got a pretty evasive and uninformative reply that said some pretty general fluff about moderation policies or something, and my account, to the best of my knowledge, is still flagged in this way. There had been a series of other (fairly respected) users who had also been quietly flagged in this way, some of whom probably for noting on other places on the net that this was happening.
From my experience, this idea is absolutely terrible. It isn't hard to spot, it's a particularly capricious and dishonest form of site management, and when (not if) users do realise this sort of thing is going on, they begin to wonder if the whole site isn't just some ridiculous managed simulacrum. and lose respect for the administrators. It's far better to just nuke posts and ban users honestly, than indulge in trying this clever, but counterproductive tactic.
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On June 08 2011 20:25 zalz wrote:
Or maybe...we have all allready been hellbanned. Some serious sixth sense stuff going on here.
Well I'll reply to your post, just to set your mind at rest!
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Hellbanning is pretty funny. Reminds me of how in Runescape if a mod muted you you didn't get a message or anything, you just had to figure it out from people ignoring you.
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Hellbanning is a pretty cool idea, but I still don't like it, because its like going back to high school, where dealing with a disliked person is to just not talk to them. It doesn't really confront the real issue.
But then again, trolls =/= people :D
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Reddit is probably the biggest site I can think of that hellbans, and it seems pretty effective for a site of that type.
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It's just very unfair and disrespectful. Yeah, even the worst Trolls deserve basic respect: namely, to be treated openly.
You want to ban someone, you tell him. You don't do things behind his back. That's just not the way to treat people, whoever they are.
Really immoral, for what I can say.
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EPT
