a) What comments will be killed; and
b) What process will be followed to determine whether a comment is killed.
Sorry, but security through obscurity is no excuse for not making this stuff transparent.
Frankly, I don't care so much about the internal mechanisms used to kill posts. I just want to understand the policy; I have the showdead flag on and at least a quarter of the time, I can't for the life of me figure out why a comment was killed. That lack of transparency makes me uncomfortable.
I can see the rationale for it at some level but I really doubt that it has much effect, spammers are pretty good at monitoring the effect of their actions.
It also makes me wonder who the mysterious 'you've been banned' emailer is.
It also makes me wonder who the mysterious 'you've been banned' emailer is.
What? I've never heard about this. (Edit: Oh, I glossed over half the threadstarter's text.)
That's very well possible.
(edit: I doubt someone would go out of their way to alert a troll to being banned though)
> What? I've never heard about this.
You would have if you read the posting at the top of the page ;)
The problem is that HN has turned into a monster of a forum, and to know everything that goes on behind the scenes to keep it functioning and to set up guidelines that navigate this perfectly is utopian. False positives and accidents happen, admins welcome reports of these, I don't get what the community gets out of them, though.
Someone here would probably be able to answer the question faster.
We were discussing emailing pg a short while ago and the consensus then seemed to be "only if it's really important".
Who's to say that the guys on here http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders don't have some kind of uber-user power because of their high karma score?
We've already established in a number of threads over the past few months that some of these folks (to be left unnamed) have invested remarkable effort into attaining these scores and think very highly of themselves and don't feel the need to answer to anyone for their otherwise abusive behavior (like hitting the downvote cap %, or flagging users they don't like etc.).
More interesting is that the community discussion around those guys' behavior also showed interesting patterns in the way HN works. Eventually pg shows up and says something like "yeah well, if your karma is above 10k, and you have a 30% upvote surplus, and it's a thursday, you can kill user accounts, but only 2 a year, unless their name starts with a t,s,kh, or an odd number." and then somebody posts the relevant arc source for that.
We all then walk away scratching our heads as to why that's something built into the site, but we have no internal mail system or simple way of contacting the admins.