[anigbrowl]

Inc ase people weren't aware, there's a 'showdead' option in your HN profile that lets you see dead comments and submissions, eg those from hellbanned accounts. I don't think terry's comments are so consistently offensive as suggested above but he does post a lot of stuff that is bizarre or offensive to the casual reader, so the hellban makes sense.

Other times he posts lucid informative comments on technical topics and usually someone with Showdead enabled will copy them into the thread so everyone else can see them. It's not an ideal system but it's an acceptable compromise between keeping the site usable for as many as possible without completely barring access to someone like Terry.

[ecdavis]

It would be neat if a sufficient number of upvotes could cause a comment from a hellbanned account to show up as normal. I guess this could be gamed to circumvent bans, but in Terry's case it could lead to his informative/worthwhile comments being visible to more people.

[MertsA]

Make it a perk for high karma users like downvoting.

[guscost]

Also I've made a bookmarklet for anyone who wants it, which re-colors the faded comments with shades of red. In my opinion this is a much better user experience, as these comments are appropriately flagged but still readable without much effort:

https://github.com/guscost/bookmarklets/

Load the bookmarklets.html in a browser and then drag "Re-Color HN" to your bookmarks.

The faded down-voted comments are my least favorite part of the UI here (it's like "this comment is now 75% censored").

[josteink]

Inc ase people weren't aware, there's a 'showdead' option in your HN profile

Thank you. I wasn't aware of this, and I'm glad I can sidestep what has (in my opinion) at times been a too narrow moderation of these forums.