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[clayfoot]

LiveJournal gives you a method to ban users from commenting on your journal, without removing them from your friends list. There's no indication to the banned user, until they try to post a comment. Then, and only then, LJ indicates the user has been banned by disabling the check box to comment with your own id:

Comments

[pnh]

You mean, they only find out they've been banned after they compose a comment and try to post it?

If true, that's extraordinarily nasty; it punishes people harder the more time they put into composing a comment.

[clayfoot]

Depending on how you get to the 'Post Comment' button, that's exactly right. It's a waste of time for the banned commenter, and a needless waste of bandwidth for LJ.

[pnh]

This sounds like it was dreamed up by someone who can't imagine anyone spending more than thirty seconds on a comment.

What a thoroughly bad idea.

[mollydot]

Perhaps that's on the assumption that people are only banned for good reason.

[pnh]

Even people who were initially banned for good reasons shouldn't be punished more for taking longer to write a comment. No one should.

Taking time to consider one's words is behavior that ought to be encouraged in everyone, certainly in people who have previously behaved badly enough to get banned. Arranging matters so that people only discover they've been banned after they finish composing a comment isn't justice and it isn't good social engineering. It's nothing more than a sadistic practical joke. It does exactly zero to make LJ a better place.

[hellmutt]

People I know have been hit by similar annoying LJ-behaviour; for example, I linked a community post in which someone asks for responses, a friend wrote one and only THEN found the community is set to members-only commenting.

[clayfoot]

A good point. I could imagine how this script could be altered to do a "look ahead" to every journal from the current view (i.e., the friends list page), to see if you could actually post to each linked journal for whatever reason, then alter all of the comment/reply links if you can't.

[mollydot]

Taking time to consider one's words is behavior that ought to be encouraged in everyone, certainly in people who have previously behaved badly enough to get banned.

Good point.