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Comment by nym | Hacker News Reader

BoingBoing went through the same thing... they closed down comments completely, and then some time later brought them back with a community moderator, who ironically privately censored posts by "disemvoweling", as well as completely censoring posts related to Violet Blue (or anyone referencing that fiasco).

http://sfist.com/2008/07/01/boing_boing_responds_to_violet_b...

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We had a more subtle approach at a forum for IT pros I used to moderate. We called it the Crazy Cafe. Known trolls wouldn't be banned -- they'd just create a new login and start trolling again, leading to a metagame amongst our community of guessing which of the old trolls the new troll really was. Instead, we'd simply flag the troll as a member of the Crazy Cafe, and their posts would be invisible except to other members of the Crazy Cafe (and to mods, if we so chose). The trolls didn't know they'd been made invisible; all they saw was that no one (save other trolls) responded to their flame bait, and thus they lost interest. It worked shockingly well.

The same thing is done here, and it's called a "hellban." The difference being that anyone can see hellbanned posts if they turn "showdead" to on - which implies that most of the time, other hellbanned people won't see each other.

I don't understand why the "disemvoweling" was ironic? That was something that she was already well known for doing on her own blog.

I actually stopped reading boingboing after the Violet Blue thing, because their response to it seemed so fundamentally dishonest.

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