Accounts cannot currently be blocked globally, so that stewards must lock users out of their accounts to stop them. This leads to a range of challenges:
- Locks are opaque and confusing: they did not initially give an error message -- from the user's perspective, their session simply disappears and their password no longer works. This makes locks impossible to appeal or understand for users, which exacerbates the situation of false-positives.
- It would be beneficial to let stewards block accounts, with an appropriate you've-been-blocked message when they try to edit or create/unify local accounts. [NB: this may be improving as of 2023]
- A global block can be locally disabled if needed, or time-limited (we can workaround it with something like this, but this is currently not used in practice).
- Here is a case that could use a short-time global block (instead of a global lock).
- Global locks were designed for troublemakers that aren't usually worth a second chance, such as spammers, LTA sockpuppets, globally banned users and the like. However, they are also the only global recourse for less severe cases like blocking non-VOA users ( example ), so appeals may be expected.
- Having a Meta user talk page open allows blocks to be discussed on Meta; not possible for locked users
This is also useful for the Temporary accounts project, as locking a temporary account would mean that the user will just create a new temporary account on their next edit. By globally blocking them, it prevents edits without logging them out.