His post is mistaken. His account isn't banned. I banned it temporarily while waiting for a reply to my email, then unbanned it. (I often do this when I ask people to stop doing something, because I've found that some people keep resubmitting otherwise.) I don't remember exactly how much later that was, but usually it's less than a day; if it were longer I'd forget. If he'd replied to my email I would have unbanned him immediately.
I told him this when I came across that blog post a while ago, but he seems to prefer his more colorful version of the story.
I think the problem here is that the only type of banning you have is hellbanning and slowbanning. It would have been clearer if you had just “normal-banned” jcs, so he got a message saying “you have been banned and can’t post anything”. That would have avoided the misunderstanding to some extent.
Hellbanning should be reserved for users you want to prevent from noticing that they’re banned, so they won’t create a new account. That would be users who you think hold no hope of salvation, not those who you are just giving a warning to.
Even better in this particular case would be yet another type of ban that informs the user “you have been temporarily suspended from posting; check your email for the reason”. That would let the user know that the ban is temporary so they don’t get upset that they were apparently permanently banned for one mistake.
Yes, it would be nice feature to have two kinds of banning. But there are so many other things on my todo list, and though this particular glitch attracted lots of attention, it happens vanishingly rarely and doesn't affect the site much. So there is a lot more payoff for users if I focus on e.g. ways to improve comment threads.
As an aside, you should consider disabling the automatic IP banning, which is clearly overzealous. The places I read HN from, including the office and my home LAN, have static IPs, and approximately every 14 days I find that my IP is suddenly banned, and I have to resort to a proxy server to use HN.
When this happens I end up shooting you a personal email, to which you have replied, dismissively, only once. Either you are reading my emails or there is some kind of expiry on the bans, because I find I am usually unbanned within a few days to a week.
Oh, and there is nothing malicious happening on my LAN that warrants this kind of banning. I'm a casual HN reader/poster.
I told him this when I came across that blog post a while ago, but he seems to prefer his more colorful version of the story.