I somehow stumbled on the silenced users list which I would expect to be empty but it actually isn’t. (Silenced users can’t post or reply or do basically anything other than PM admins; it’s much like being blocked on a wiki. Except it’s apparently done automatically by some heuristic.)
There are two totally new users who have been silenced for “New user typed too fast” which seems a bit ridiculous (if the system gently asked them whether they want to spend more time on the post, I could understand that, but basically just disabling the account?), and a third users who has asked a question and behaved in a perfectly normal way, silenced for no reason.
I guess that tells us a couple things:
- silencing is erratic and best disabled until we actually have a volume of spam that requires it
- users who are silenced mistakenly don’t reach out to the admins so we should be extra careful about automated defenses
- the system doesn’t even warn admins when it moderates people (presumably that’s a bug? it’s not really reasonable)