Hacker News Bans XahLee.org (2009)

By Xah Lee. Date: .

Hacker News

“Hacker News” website, at http://news.ycombinator.com/, banned my website xahlee.org around 2009-02 or earlier.

Someone posted a question about why some sites seem to be banned, titled “Ask PG- What is the list of banned sites and why are they banned”. He asked for reasons or a public list. The URL is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910. (local archive: Hacker_News_xahlee.org_ban.zip) Then, someone posted the list of domains/sub-domains that are banned, and it contains my site “xahlee.org”.

No explicit reason is given. It appears to me, my site was banned because one of my essay: Why Software Sucks (2001), has been submitted to the site in 2009-02, then in the discussion, someone mentioned i am a troll, then admin placed my site on ban.

Note: i never submitted anything to Hacker News. I did not even have a hacker news account. I just noticed that sometimes my site got submitted by others.

google search hacker news xah
Google search results on Hacker News site, as of . If you go to any of the linked page on ycombinator.com, it won't show normal content such as original post or other user's comments, i think this is because xahlee.org being placed on ban list there by someone.