[dang]

That's not accurate. Shadow-banning is rare to begin with (reserved for spammers, serial trolls, and other forms of abuse), and even when we do it it's always possible for people to get information by emailing us. I can think of a couple exceptions to that but they've all been preceded by long email chains.

If an account has been posting to HN for a while and hasn't been banned under other guises, we always tell them when we're banning them, and nearly always after multiple warnings.