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Post date: Nov 18, 2011 8:45:59 AM
Decisions, decisions!
Here is an excerpt, somewhat edited for brevity by me, of the @CodingHorror's June 2011 response to user questions about his StackExchange site policy: Suspension ban or hell ban?
There are three forms of secretly suspending users that I know of. A hell banned user is invisible to all other users, but not himself. From his perspective, he is participating normally in the community but nobody ever responds to him. He can no longer disrupt the community because he is effectively a ghost. It's a clever way of enforcing the "don't feed the troll" rule. When nothing he posts ever gets a response, a hell banned user is likely to get bored, frustrated and leave... as a child, the silent treatment is the cruelest punishment of all.
I associate hell banning with the Something Awful Forums. Per this amazing MetaFilter discussion, the roots of hell banning go much deeper – to an early Telnet BBS system called Citadel, where the "problem user" response concept was introduced in 1986. Like so much social software, it gets reinvented by clueless software developers who believe they're the first programmer smart enough to figure out how people work. It's supported in most popular forum and blog software, as documented in the Drupal Cave module.
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.
Slow banned users have delays forcibly introduced into every page visited. From their perspective, your site has become terribly slow. And stays that way. They can hardly disrupt the community when they're struggling to get web pages to load. According to research from Google and Amazon, every page load delay directly reduces participation. Get slow enough, for long enough, and a slow banned user will seek greener pastures elsewhere. An error banned user has errors inserted at random into pages visited... consider this a more severe form of slow banning – instead of pages loading slowly, they might not
Dante's Inferno, Fifth Circle by Gustave Dore
load at all, return cryptic HTTP errors, return the wrong page, fail to load key dependencies like JavaScript, images, CSS and so forth. I'm sure your devious little minds can imagine dozens of ways things could go "wrong" for an error banned user. While more esoteric it isn't theoretical; an implementation exists in the Drupal Misery module. We try to use a ...model of democracy with Stack Exchange... On some level, [these methods] feel disingenuous to me... like wishing users into the cornfield, with superhuman power beyond the ken of normal people. But I've also spent many painful hours trapped in public dialog about users who were,at best, just wasting everyone's time. Democracy is a wonderful thing, but efficient, no....
See http://drupal.org/project/misery for further arcane details of the Drupal Misery Module. Above illustrations were sourced, though obviously not created, by me.
Zerohedge used Drupal for his website in the past. I checked. Drupal forum software was certainly used for the extensive user comment section. @Alea said he was banned by Zerohedge comment admins. I wonder if it were in Drupal? And whether Hell Banned, Error Banned, or Dante-esque banned to a remote circle of Sinner's Hell as the Coding Horror described?
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