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).
As such, we’ve renamed block to “silence” in Rename "Blocked" to "Silenced" · discourse/discourse@1f14350 · GitHub
Over the next few days we’ll be working our way through Meta to update documentation and other discussions that refer to “blocking”.