Okay, for the record, no moderator took any action against me whatsoever. pg was absolutely correct.
I experienced an incredible series of coincidences. Due to those coincidences, it seemed very much like I was being banned by a moderator. But it was just extraordinarily bad luck that I managed to run into each of those events. Here's what happened:
Somehow, (and I still have no idea how), I did something to cause HN to blacklist my home IP address. But from my point of view, it appeared to me that I was IP banned in response to posting my original comment.
But I wanted to be certain that it wasn't just a coincidence, so I tried logging in via Tor. I was able to login successfully for about 10 minutes.
Then I restarted Tor, so I was assigned a new Tor IP address. I tried to login again, and that's when I experienced my first bad luck: that specific Tor IP triggered either a bug or a protection mechanism, resulting in HN failing to process my login request. (The login page redirected me to http://news.ycombinator.com/null and silently ignored my login attempt.)
I restarted Tor to get a new IP address and tried again. Same thing: even with the new ip addr, HN refused my login attempts. I restarted Tor yet again with the same result. So at that point I had tried to login with three different Tor IP addresses, and the login attempts failed all three times. So from my point of view, that seemed very much like a moderator was banning me.
Then I created "sillysaurus3" which was instantly hellbanned. This was an automatic action, not a moderator action. (I assume it happened because a lot of spam originates via Tor.)
So I tried again. I created "sillysaur" and posted a comment. I restarted Tor and verified that the comment was publicly visible (i.e. verified sillysaur was not hellbanned). Then I updated my sillysaurus2 profile to say "I've been banned, and my new account is sillysaur." Ten minutes later I checked sillysaur again and discovered that it had become hellbanned.
So at that point it seemed reasonable to conclude that some moderator was actively banning me. But in reality no moderator had taken any action. It was just bad luck (somehow triggering the IP ban) followed by incredible bad luck (somehow running into the login bug / protection mechanism three times in a row from three different Tor IPs that all happened to trigger it) followed by even more bad luck (my new accounts created via Tor were automatically hellbanned, probably because spam was originating from those Tor IP addresses which I had been assigned).
So that was a pretty crazy series of events, and I'm very sorry for scaring people with my warning. It was incorrect: no one had done anything, just as pg said.
I experienced an incredible series of coincidences. Due to those coincidences, it seemed very much like I was being banned by a moderator. But it was just extraordinarily bad luck that I managed to run into each of those events. Here's what happened:
Somehow, (and I still have no idea how), I did something to cause HN to blacklist my home IP address. But from my point of view, it appeared to me that I was IP banned in response to posting my original comment.
But I wanted to be certain that it wasn't just a coincidence, so I tried logging in via Tor. I was able to login successfully for about 10 minutes.
Then I restarted Tor, so I was assigned a new Tor IP address. I tried to login again, and that's when I experienced my first bad luck: that specific Tor IP triggered either a bug or a protection mechanism, resulting in HN failing to process my login request. (The login page redirected me to http://news.ycombinator.com/null and silently ignored my login attempt.)
I restarted Tor to get a new IP address and tried again. Same thing: even with the new ip addr, HN refused my login attempts. I restarted Tor yet again with the same result. So at that point I had tried to login with three different Tor IP addresses, and the login attempts failed all three times. So from my point of view, that seemed very much like a moderator was banning me.
Then I created "sillysaurus3" which was instantly hellbanned. This was an automatic action, not a moderator action. (I assume it happened because a lot of spam originates via Tor.)
So I tried again. I created "sillysaur" and posted a comment. I restarted Tor and verified that the comment was publicly visible (i.e. verified sillysaur was not hellbanned). Then I updated my sillysaurus2 profile to say "I've been banned, and my new account is sillysaur." Ten minutes later I checked sillysaur again and discovered that it had become hellbanned.
So at that point it seemed reasonable to conclude that some moderator was actively banning me. But in reality no moderator had taken any action. It was just bad luck (somehow triggering the IP ban) followed by incredible bad luck (somehow running into the login bug / protection mechanism three times in a row from three different Tor IPs that all happened to trigger it) followed by even more bad luck (my new accounts created via Tor were automatically hellbanned, probably because spam was originating from those Tor IP addresses which I had been assigned).
So that was a pretty crazy series of events, and I'm very sorry for scaring people with my warning. It was incorrect: no one had done anything, just as pg said.