Should moderators publicly point out when a user is blocked from asking questions on Stack Overflow?

Question

Stack Overflow users are automatically blocked from asking questions when they have had too many downvoted or deleted questions. (The details of the formula are secret.)

When another site attempts to migrate a question to SO, if the asker is blocked there, the migration is instantly rejected and the question stays closed on the source site. This shows up in the question history¹, but you have to go looking for it.

Should moderators point out what is happening? This exposes the information that the asker is question-blocked, which is normally not public. Or should moderators remain discreet (which makes it look like they didn't attempt to migrate the question, and may leave the asker unaware)?

¹ _{“Post Closed by …” immediately followed by “Post Locked by Community” (as in a real migration) immediately followed by “Post Unlocked by Community” (as in a real migration rejection due to closure on the target site).}

Answer 1

Good question!

I don't think you should publicly call attention to the fact that the author is question-blocked, as that may be sensitive and may make some authors feel like they've been publicly called out or publicly punished, which isn't good. Presumably, question-blocking is intended is intended to maintain site standards (and possibly to give people a time-out), not to publicly shame the affected people. Public shaming is more serious than privately blocking them from posting questions.

---

If the author is the one who requested the migration, it seems fine to leave it up to your discretion whether to try to find some way to privately notify the author about the situation (not sure if you even have any mechanism to do that -- super-ping, maybe?), or not. If someone else requested the migration, I wouldn't even bother with that. If you were going to migrate the question because it isn't suitable here, I would suggest just closing the question here and leaving it at that. If the question is on-topic here, then it seems like the obvious course of action is to leave it open here. I suspect now I'm saying things that are completely obvious.