[WikiEN-l] "block" considered too harsh a word?

Tue May 10 16:05:14 UTC 2005

As we have seen numerous times in the past, users who are new to the 
Wikipedia tend to vastly overreact to being blocked. Some people throw 
quite a fit even when they're blocked for a mere 24 hours.

A friend of mine suggested that perhaps the word should be changed to 
something more euphemistic and something less harsh than "block". I can 
sympathise with this thinking, because if I saw a page telling me I'm 
"blocked", not knowing what it means I would probably interpret it to 
mean "blocked indefinitely", and as we know people don't tend to read 
the entire message and hence don't notice where it mentions the time limit.

Unfortunately, he didn't have any ideas what to call it instead. So I'm 
wondering what everyone else here thinks?