How does HN handle trolls?

Here’s what the guidelines say:

“Please don’t complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don’t feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don’t also comment that you did.

Please don’t use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it.”

Discourse: Discussion System

Civilized Discussion

Why break conversations into awkward and arbitrary pages, where you have to constantly find the Next Page button?

We’ve replaced all that with the power of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Keep scrolling down.

Dynamic notifications

When someone quotes your post, we’ll notify you. When someone mentions your @name, we’ll notify you. When someone replies to your post… well, you get the idea.

And if you’re not around, we’ll email you, too.

Simple, but with context

iscourse is a simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line.

Expand context at the bottom and top of each post – even quotes – to reveal the full conversation without losing your place.

Born mobile, born to touch

Discourse was designed for high resolution touch devices, with a built in mobile layout.

Read or post from your laptop, tablet, and phone without constantly being told this site has an app, do you want it?

Links automatically expand

Want to share a cool link you found? Just paste it in on a single line and we’ll make it awesome.

Links to Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, GitHub, Twitter, Flickr and hundreds of other popular websites automatically expand to provide additional context and information.

Reply while you read

Type your reply while you continue to read, altering your reply and adding new quotes from others as you explore the topic! You can jump around to completely different topics, too.

We’ll save your spot – and your response – even if you finish on a different device.

Real time updates

If a topic changes while you are reading or responding to it, or new replies arrive, it will update automatically.

As new topics arrive, they also appear at the top of the list.

Remembers your place

Topics that you read for a while, replied to, or created will be automatically tracked for you. Don’t worry about reading an entire topic in one sitting – we’ll always save your place.

Log in with … anything

Use your Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or GitHub credentials to log in. Or set up single sign-on with your existing website.

Paste to share images

Want to share an image? Just copy and paste. Or drag and drop! Posting LOLCats has never been this easy.

Search that actually works

Search from any page – just start typing and get results instantly as you type. Advanced search options for power users, too.

Community moderation

As users participate by reading and posting, they gain trust – and powerful abilities to help maintain the community and push out trolls and spammers.

Bring your friends

Once you’re trusted, invite your friends via email to reply your topic with a single click. Staff can easily invite entire groups of people by uploading email addresses.