ed comments and has been posting
legitimate but invisible comments for over a year. You can clearly see the
learning effects: his first couple of comments are not HN quality.
Unfortunately by the time he got accustomed to HN he had been silenced.

~~~
redthrowaway
I think we can fix hellbanning without too much tinkering. Perhaps a simple
notice if someone's first posts are downvoted advising them to check the
submissions and comments guidelines, perhaps with some common first time
mistakes and their more preferable counterparts added. That should help the
noobs while still allowing trolls to be banned.

------
enjo
This is tangential, but somehow related:

My level of frustration Redmond has reached epic levels. My company spends
thousands of dollars a week managing advertising campaigns on Adcenter. They
have an API which has been nothing but issues, but given the breadth of our
advertising base it's absolutely necessary that we use it.

Today we have entered day number FIVE of an outage in which the API (at least
one critical portion of it) simply errors out no matter what call you make. So
for five days we've been unable to pause campaigns, change bid prices, or
otherwise do anything to effectively manage our campaigns.

It's nuts. This is the second major outage in the last couple of weeks. The
part that KILLS me is that nobody in Redmond seems to give a damn. They
announced that they had a problem two days after I brought it to their
attention. They are apparently working on some sort of fix that may or may not
be pushed sometime in the last three days.

Meanwhile we are absolutely blowing through cash because of the things that we
can't adjust. We're tens of thousands of keywords spread out over more than a
thousand campaigns. We don't employ anybody to manage these by hand...

~~~
forwardslash
I assume you're using the REST API? While they try and roll out a fix, have
you tried to use the adCenter Desktop to at least somewhat manage the ads?

~~~
AJ007
That might work if adcenter desktop was actually stab