[dang]

You crossed badly into flamewar in this thread, which breaks the site guidelines regardless of how right you are or feel. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do that on HN again; it's strictly destructive here, and someone else behaving badly is no justification.

[reitzensteinm]

That's fair enough. I knew it was totally against the site guidelines but I couldn't help myself.

Honestly, I think you and the other mods could be quicker with the ban hammer even if that means I'm on the chopping block for what I did here.

Eg the above account posted this nine days ago, and that was after a previous warning:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995004

[dang]

I agree. The trouble is that we don't see everything that gets posted here; there's too much. So sometimes when there's a repeated pattern of abuse, it takes longer than we would like to notice it. Users can help by flagging comments (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html for how) and by emailing [e-mail] about egregious cases.

[reitzensteinm]

Ah, I specifically picked a comment that had been killed by repeated flagging. I assumed that there'd be a human reviewing by that stage.

I've been under the impression for a while that it takes quite a bit more to be banned these days than five years ago, but that might just be nostalgia.

Anyway, I know you're volunteers and it's not really appropriate for me to be complaining about the dress code after fighting in your bar. I'm sorry for causing trouble.

[dang]

Well, we're not volunteers except in the sense that we volunteer to be paid to do this :)

I appreciate the decency of your response.