Blocked users still participate (appear) in a groups activities
When a user is blocked, I presume they are inactive and are not able to participate in Gitlab projects. I opted to deactivate them because I would rather contributions remain with the user's name rather than be re-labelled with the system wide "Ghost User" (name). The definition of blocked in Gitlab is similar to Inactive in other applications (such as Jira).
I propose that Gitlab use the "Blocked" status to also mean inactive where the user (if part of a group) will be filtered out from group activities.
Specifically, if I have users in a group "Software" then all blocked users are treated as active users and when the "@software" is applied to a comment, those users who are Blocked will be sent emails and notifications. When using the group in merge request comments, blocked users appear in the "Participants" list, and get notifications and emails from the project.
Since Blocked users should not get access to Git Repositories, Gitlab emails and notifications breaks that paradigm. Since Blocked users are not able to login, they should be filtered from group activities.