The Discourse team has renamed the staff moderation tool “block” to “silence” to better reflect its function—preventing users from posting without suspending them entirely jomaxro. This is purely a terminology change with no functional impact jomaxro; any functional discrepancies should be reported as bugs. The team is updating documentation across Meta and has already renamed relevant site settings, including block_new_user to silence_new_userSidV, jomaxro, jomaxro. Translation files are also being reviewed for consistency. While “block” was rarely used and only recently had a dedicated mod button, the rename is expected to cause minimal disruption codinghorror. Community members are encouraged to report any missed updates or inconsistencies.
We’ve heard feedback over the years that “block”, the staff tool to prevent users from posting on the site was unclear. Without knowing what “block” meant in a Discourse sense, one could just as easily infer that it mean block the user from using the site (which is a suspension).
Block was a rare state to be in and only recently was an explicit button added for mods to put users in it. So I don’t expect much pain from the rename.
