In the blogs this morning is word that the Sanfrancisco Chronicle was deleting user comments and not telling the users. The users could see their comments but everyone else saw a deleted message. They were even maintaining a list of banned users who's comment where just automatically deleted but they never knew.

This saved the admins a heap of headache, since the banned users didn't complain cause they didn't know their comments weren't being read.

You can read about it here.

The Courier Mail sorta does this at times. They delete stories after people have left negative feedback against the paper and then re-submitted it as if it was just added.

That feature has been in forums since the late 90s. A similar feature I remember is that when a user was banned, it simply became difficult for them to browse the site, pages would load slower, occasionally not at all, thread links would direct back to the front page of the site, etc... just to discourage the person from visiting the site.

we used to do it somewhere too

That's very cool having been stupid enough to admin and moderate forums before.

Its also a bit evil. Which is probably why its cool.

that would be like my worst nitemare

AKA "Hellbanning"

it allows me to sleep well at night, knowing we have so many internet ninja's on these forums.

forum ninjas make me feel safe too