The story was explicitly brought back. You can upvote a dead story, but I'm not sure whether the submitter gains karma for that, and whether that causes the story to move higher up the front page. But the story will remain dead unless necromanced.
This seems like a good time to share some thoughts about killing submissions. The troubling aspects of the current "dead submission" implementation are:
- You can't comment on the submission itself, only reply to existing comments. I understand the motivation for this, but it feels too close to censorship.
- After a submission is killed, there is no way to visit it. It is good that dead stories are no longer clickable, but I wish there were some way to reconstruct its URL for the highly motivated.
- No reason is given for killing a story. Sometimes a reason is posted in comments, but it's not mandatory. Requiring a one-line justification from the executioner would be both educational and personal.
Also, given that this unabashedly-political article is apparently supported by Management, it seems really hypocritical to disable dantheman's long-standing account without warning, apparently for submitting one off-topic political story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 ... It would be "important" if courts were using evidence despite police errors, right? Then why is Gaza "important enough" to be featured on Hacker News, but the US isn't? I wish I could be certain that there's actually a double-standard in play here, but it's not mandatory to provide a reason for disabling an account (or for killing a story), so there's no way to find out unless I ask. More mysteriously, dantheman's off-topic submission was never killed; his account was simply disabled. So what's going on here? Has he emailed yet?
On a personal note, I'm not looking to pick a fight. I'm just concerned about my fellow users and about the direction of the community. It would be great if dantheman's account wasn't actually disabled for submitting a political story, and all of this was just a misunderstanding.
Dantheman's account wasn't disabled for submitting that comment, but for reinserting editorial remarks in a submission title after I'd reverted it to the original. There's currently no way to lock story titles, so the only way to avoid an endless cycle of reverts was to disable his account for a few hours. I only replied to that comment because there was no other way of contacting him; he had no email addr in his profile. I reinstated his account as soon as he emailed me.
Thank you for clarifying. I wonder if that's a symptom that a private messaging system would be useful for HN? But I'm really glad that dantheman learned from the experience instead of just leaving the site entirely, and I wonder if there's a way of making it obvious what happened so that other users could also be taught to avoid bad behavior.
But it probably doesn't matter much. Sorry for my possibly-inflammatory post; I'm fine with it being deleted if you'd like.
There already is private messaging within HN. We use it to communicate with founders and applicants. The main reason it's not turned on for everyone is that I worry about the attendant bureaucratic hassles. There are probably all kinds of laws either guarding people's privacy or insuring they have none from governments, and I don't even know what they are.
However, given the nature of the site membership, and the potential for a deal gone bad to result in the subpoena of any private communications a given user might have had, it's easy to see why you have not enabled this feature.
Are you sure it was dead? I just looked in the kill log, and there is no record of an editor killing it. The kill log is only kept per server invocation, but the server process has been running since yesterday evening, PST.
I was pretty sure it was, but I could have been mistaken. Is there a difference between "dead" and whatever happens when enough users flag a submission? If so, it could have been the latter.
Can posts be made "undead" by additional up votes, or was it explicitly brought back by a moderator?