[dang]

I'd be interested in what took years—can you explain? My worst case in terms of responding to emails is a few months—which is terrible, but happens when (a) the inbox is backed up and (b) the request requires more than a little time.

It doesn't really depend on whether I think someone's trolling, because the response is usually much the same in either case and anyhow genuine trolling (i.e. totally bad-faith action to provoke or waste time) is relatively rare.

[lazyasciiart]

I misremembered: you replied to the initial email and then stopped responding because (you explained much later in another conversation) my continued angry questions appeared to match the profile of a type of angry time-sink user.

[dang]

Ah, I see. Sorry if I made the wrong call about that. I definitely do not always get it right.

[lapcat]

I find it very odd that a 16 year old web service with user accounts has no method of contacting the moderators other than email.

I have no desire to take HN "offline" and pollute my inbox/outbox with a bunch of moderation notes. That's too annoying.

It might be slightly better if every submission and comment had a mailto: that automatically populated a new email with a link, but even then, this shouldn't be necessary.