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I happened to notice a chat user who has the following information in their profile: "This user is suspended on the parent site and cannot chat for 64 days."

At the same time the user is not suspended on the site which is linked in their profile.

So the information in the profile is actually inconsistent. (On one hand, it claims that the user is suspended on the parent site. On the other hand, there is a link to the profile on a site where the user is suspended.)

Is this a bug? Or it works as expected and I missed something?

I did not know how to put this into a bug report without linking to a specific user. At the same time, I did not want to bring attention to one specific user. I decided to post in this way with more details in a flag - to let the moderators or the Stack Exchange team to decide how much can be revealed.

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    People can get a site suspension that carries over to their chat parent, then change their chat parent. It won't lift the suspension, but it seems the most likely explanation for what happened here. An easy way for you to check would be to find the site profile where the user is still suspended, granted that that's not hidden or deleted now.
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 18:54
  • related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/145235/… and meta.stackexchange.com/questions/295395/…
    – rene Mod
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 18:55
  • @Tinkeringbell Can also suspension on this Meta Stack Exchange (and, consequently, on chat.meta.stackexchange) propagate to the chat.stackexchange.com chatserver? (I will add that I am aware of the fact about changing parent site - still the only site where I did find a suspension of corresponding length is Meta Stack Exchange and I thought that the two chatservers are rather independent.)
    – Martin
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 19:01
  • Hmm, that last one is good one. I must admit I don't know that either. I looked at the profile in the flag, it seems weird to me.
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 19:03
  • Does this answer your question? My account has been temporarily suspended; what does that mean? (see last two bullets under When an account is suspended)
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 19:35
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    @Sonic I don't think it does. Those two points do not explain what I'm seeing on the chat profile. I'm not sure what I am looking at though, I dropped this in the moderator chat for feedback. And even if we do figure it out, I don't know how much of it can be revealed in an answer ;)
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 19:47
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    @Tink chat profiles are very buggy. I saw tons of chat profiles totally out of synchronization, with totally wrong reputation score, sometimes with wrong name - usually it happens due to account deletion and/or merging which often "forget" about chat profile, leaving it a "zombie", artifact of some past account. Worth to check this course for whatever user OP refers to.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 19:57
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    @Shadow This is most definitely not a 'Zombie', but thanks for trying!
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 20:04
  • @Tink no problem. Still, maybe look for some failed user merge in the past, causing odd issues in the present. Only SE employee can see such things, as far as I can tell.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 20:12

2 Answers 2

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I've chatted about this a bit, and it seems the most likely option is that in this case, it is indeed a site suspension carrying over. We have no way (records) to definitively prove this, though this particular profile was a mess of annotations and it seems one long suspension carried over to the chat profile several times, most likely due to reparenting.

Chat parents on chat.stackexchange can can also be Meta Stackexchange and Stack Overflow. We can't be sure, but in this case the order of events seems to be long site suspension -> reparent -> chat suspension.

Reparenting will not lift your chat suspension if it is done after a suspension from the parent site carries over, but reparenting from a site you're not suspended on to one you're already suspended on will make the suspension carry over. It seems the latter happened here, several times due to manual unsuspension in between.

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    Thanks for the answer. I did not know that Meta Stack Exchange can be parent site for a chat user (chat profile) on chat.stackexchange.com. That would explained the inconsistent lengths, which was to me the length of chat suspension seemed weird.
    – Martin
    Commented May 13, 2020 at 13:47
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There are two possibilities, as far as I know, which could cause this:

  • The suspension ended a long time ago but the chat profile didn't update. This is very unlikely, maybe impossible, and definitely possible only if the user hasn't visited chat at all for a very long time. Chat profiles update slowly, but they will update when a user is actually active in chat - not necessarily by talking, but even just by dropping into a chatroom.

  • The chat parent user was changed. If a user gets suspended on a site which happens to be their chat parent at that time, the suspension will propagate to chat. If they change their chat parent later, the suspension will not automatically be lifted, unless a moderator refreshes the chat profile from the new parent site.

    Note that, even though SO and Main Meta have their own separate chat servers, chat entities (either users or rooms) can still be parented to SO or to Main Meta on the main chat.SE server. So it's quite possible that the user you're looking at was suspended on Main Meta while that was their chat parent, and then changed their parent account to another site but it didn't lift the chat suspension.

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  • Thanks! I did not know that Meta Stack Exchange can be a parent user also on chat.stackexchange.com. (I should have realized that there is such possibility - since I saw before some rooms associated with Meta Stack Exchange on this chatserver. It simply did not occur to me that the same thing is possible for users.)
    – Martin
    Commented May 13, 2020 at 13:50

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