Our policy pages have never been updated to make a distinction between bans and blocks; they should be considered synonymous for policy purposes, at least for the time being. (It's never been a problem before because we never block anyone except to enforce a ban.)
I quote from https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:How_to_handle_unwanted_edits#User_ ban: "Bans made without a vote and without an understanding of the gravity of this action (and not covered by one of the exceptions listed below) are considered abuse by the administrator. '''In other words, a user ban is a really, really big deal.'''"
At this point, you should either rescind the block or else put it up on the ban nominations page for consideration by the community.
Powers &8^]
-----Original Message----- From: Snowolf [mailto:ml@snowolf.eu] Sent: Sunday 20 January 2013 20:13 To: wikivoyage-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikivoyage-l] User bans
I should also add that the user was not indeed banned but rather indefinitely blocked.
Snowolf
On 2013-01-21 0210, Snowolf wrote:
Run of the mill spammer, replaced normal useful texts with spam to his own website and ignoring warnings, not sure what the big deal or problem is. How would you suggest it be dealt otherwise?
Snowolf
On 2013-01-21 0159, Ian Sergeant wrote:
Hi,
What's going on here?
http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/User_talk:SheikhTravel
It appears we got one of our first actual user indef ban without so
much
as nomination?
I don't want to tread on toes, but this seems totally out of line with current policy..
Ian.