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Suspensions are in most cases carried out per-site, users are not banned from the whole network in general. There are network-wide suspensions, but they are not used for misbehaviour of users. Users get a fresh chance on another site even if they have been suspended on another SE site.

So I was surprised to find out that suspensions on an SE site are transferred into chat suspensions, if the suspension happened on the parent site. The parent site can be freely chosen by the user, so it is pretty much random whether the suspension is carried into chat or not.

This suspension transfer doesn't fit to the general suspension policy of SE, and tying it to the rather arbitrary parent user concept doesn't make a lot of sense. I suggest to entirely remove this feature, if a user misbehaves on chat as well, we'll just suspend him there again.

Suspending users from the chat specifically associated with the site seems pretty reasonable, but the problem is that Chat.SE doesn't work that way. If you are suspended from Chat.SE, you cannot chat on rooms for any site except SO and Meta, all SE 2.0 sites use the same chat server.

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    I always thought the automatic chat suspension was a result of the "locked down to 1 rep" behavior of suspensions.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Aug 29, 2012 at 6:19
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    @jadarnel27 No, it's not. I can manually remove the suspension, it's not tied to reputation (at least for users that still have enough rep after suspension on one site, not sure about users with only one account)
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Aug 29, 2012 at 6:21
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    Thanks for clarifying, I never realized they were separate suspensions. And I wasn't thinking about Chat.SE. Very good points.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Aug 29, 2012 at 6:28
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    I think chat suspensions should be imposed, to a certain degree, when a user is suspended from a site. However, to appropriately scope this, the suspension should only affect chat rooms that are tied to the site from which the user is suspended - regardless of which site the user calls his "parent site". For example, a user suspended from Server Fault should not be able to chat in The Comms Room, but should (barring a concurrent suspension from Information Security) be allowed to chat in The DMZ.
    – Iszi
    Commented Sep 10, 2012 at 20:28
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    Related but the exact opposite: Could we tie site suspensions to chat suspensions globally?
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Apr 14, 2018 at 10:16
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    Does this answer your question? Make it possible to revoke write access to public chat rooms - why it's the default, though it could be changed.
    – Rob
    Commented Jan 28, 2022 at 14:43
  • Well, as the poster of the 'other' opinion - that site suspensions should be global, I think I'd support the suggestion in the last paragraph as a fair solution, now that this is getting a look at :D
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jul 2 at 12:56

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This suspension transfer doesn't fit to the general suspension policy of SE, and tying it to the rather arbitrary parent user concept doesn't make a lot of sense. I suggest to entirely remove this feature, if a user misbehaves on chat as well, we'll just suspend him there again.

I have to agree. Chat bans should be site specific.

On many sites, chat rooms became a place to improve moderation of questions. If a user suspended at the "parent site" has moderation privileges at those sites where they're not suspended, it makes it unnecessarily hard for them to participate and improve their actions.

At least, that shouldn't be an automated feature, but decided case-by-case separately.

For instance, it doesn't make any sense that a site like German Language (beta) considers Stack Overflow as their parent site, and a user suspended there cannot participate in chat rooms which belong to the GL site.

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