Stealth banning

Stealth banning (also called Shadow banning and Hell banning) is a practice used by some online community managers to block content added by spammers and Internet trolls, as well as other individuals whose interests do not coincide with the managers'. The practice involves making a user's contributions invisible to all other users, but visible to themselves, making them less likely to create new accounts to add the same material. Often this blocks the problem user's contributions while making it look like they were "lost" due to a website error, thereby enforcing the community best practice of "not feeding trolls." It is used to lower the likelihood of trolls or malicious users from registering new accounts to continue trolling.

Comment ghosting (or Selective invisibility) is where an individual comment is rendered invisible to everyone except the poster in order to eliminate disruption they might otherwise cause.[1] Stealth banning is sometimes also called "Coventry" or "ghost-posting".

Michael Pryor of Fog Creek Software described shadow banning for online forums in 2006.[2] Software developer and Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood describes a theoretical use of stealth banning for Stack Overflow on his programming blog Coding Horror, explaining that when none of the banned user's posts receives a response, he or she will be likely to become bored or frustrated and leave the site.[3][4] Stealth banning is used, for example, on Hacker News,[5][6] Reddit and Craigslist.[7][8][9]

Stealth banning can be detected by using an anonymous proxy service to see if a post is visible to a separate user; if not, stealth banning may have occurred.

Craigslist has also been known to "Ghost" a user's individual ads, and reportedly their entire account. Although Craigslist is notoriously tight-lipped about their methods of troll and spam prevention, there are a multitude of individual posts from users around the world that have reported and described this phenomenon in great detail. Reportedly, an ad is placed, confirmation is sent that it has been posted. The ad may be viewed in the user's account, but, if ghosted, will fail to show up in the live listings.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Thompson, Clive (29 March 2009). "Clive Thompson on the Taming of Comment Trolls". Wired magazine. Retrieved 6 July 2014.
  2. ↑ Robert Walsh (12 January 2006). Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality. Apress. p. 183. ISBN 978-1-4302-0114-4. So one of the things we did in FogBugz to solve the problem of how do you get the person to go away and leave you alone is, well, you take their post and make it invisible to everyone else, but they still see it. They won’t know they’ve been deleted. There’s no one fanning their flame. You can’t get into a flame war if no one responds to your criticism. So they get silenced and eventually just go away. We have several ways of telling if they come back, and it’s been proven to be extremely, extremely effective. Say a spammer posts to your board and then they come back to check if it’s still there, and they see it—to them it’s still there—but no one else sees it, so they’re not bothered by it.
  3. ↑ Atwood, Jeff. "Suspension, Ban or Hellban?". Coding Horror blog. Retrieved 17 December 2011.
  4. ↑ ohjessicamarie. "Hellbanning: The Banishment of Trolls and Other Subhumans (presentation deck)". Slideshare. Retrieved 17 December 2011.
  5. ↑ Leena Rao (May 18, 2013). "The Evolution of Hacker News". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  6. ↑ "Pando: Can the democratic power of a platform like Hacker News be applied to products?". Pando.
  7. ↑ "The Craigslist Lawsuit". Finally, it remains unresolved whether craigslist's well-recognized practice of "ghosting" (the hiding or interception of user postings and emails) without the users' knowledge or consent is legal or ethical.
    Quoting: "Ghosting - Why don’t my posts show up on Craigslist?".
  8. ↑ "How to Prevent Ghost Posting on Craigslist". Small Business - Chron.com.
  9. ↑ "Ghosting on Craigslist".

External links

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