Passing this from our moderation team:

It appears that when a user has been banned, the forum will no longer allow @-pinging them.

It's a minor inconvenience for our moderator team (because they have frequent need to refer to them in reports and things). Of more concern, however, is that it publicly exposes a user's discipline status.

When we apply any sort of discipline to a user (queueing, banning, even spam flagging), it is important that nobody but the affected user can tell that anything has happened. By design, when we ban user X, other users can't see that X is banned.

However, the fact that a banned user can't be pinged anymore means that a regular user could try to ping them, find themselves unable to, and realize what's up with the user, which seems not okay to me.

 

Is this something that can be fixed? It seems like a relatively new change to the forum; I'm pretty sure we used to be able to @-ping banned users.

We recently removed banned users from the mentions auto complete in 4.6.9 based on customer feedback.