[Natsu]

Shadow banning was originally used to stop spammers who didn't really care about engaging with anyone. At least, that's what the forums I was moderating back when it was new were doing with it, we were just trying to dump the people who were spamming about herbal Viagra.

Using it on actual people was never recommended, because it was always very obvious to anyone who actually engaged with the site. They'd go back to the same old threads on another computer and find their posts were gone, which was incredibly obvious. This just created more forum controversy, e.g. back when pj of Groklaw started doing it back in the day to suppress differing opinions on that TurboHercules controversy.