This

Or just allow them to be set by the staff or an extra right, along with the right to Ban, to set their own reason and time.

I don't think it really matters what reason is presented to them, they're just going to try and manipulate it like they do now, and disabling global pm to RC works in helping ignore them too.

But then theirs those who really don't why they are banned. When i was banned on UN along time ago it didn't say why and i didn't know why. And for some reason staff (on any sever) tend to ignore global messages so you can't figure out why your banned.

Even better, You could just fill in: Months, Weeks, Days, Hours, Minutes
And the reason, would be enough

bump

I'm more for creating a ban window like this, which I use when I develop multiuser applications outside of Graal:

Spiffy window, maybe use a drop down edit text instead of just a text edit, for some predefined responses.

Assuming the staff comment could be quite large depending on the ban reason I think it should be a multi-line text edit instead of a one-line text edit but it’s just my opinion.

Perhaps --?

Nice, even contributes to that crazy prediction but personally I liked the little text boxes to specify a certain amount of days and hours.

The thing is, with predefined reasoning there is at least some consistency in the ban times that people receive. While sometimes I think there should be the ability to grant longer ban times for larger (but similar in title) offences, there should be set times that people can use for fairness in dealing with similar bans. Your system here would require you to set a manual ban length for every ban you make, and if you're a server that has a solid rule structure, you'd have to continuously look up how long people should be serving time and fill it in yourself.

Additionally, I think you need to have somewhere where you can define the ban time for the client receiving the ban; an "other" option is needed where you can write the reason in yourself. The predefined reasons limit your options and can often confuse people who are banned, as mentioned in the opening post, and a new list of options doesn't really tackle that issue unless it covers practically everything.

I agree with Rufus in this case, though I don't see any point in a field for a staff comment which is not shown to players (we already have /opencomments for this, and all servers most likely already log bans here).

Anything that requires changes to the RC is probably out, anyway.

A staff comment would be useful for expanding on certain scenarios within the ban history of a player on a global level. If I open a ban on a server and see that a player has been banned elsewhere, a short sentence aimed towards the player is less likely to be specific in terms of the situation or context it has arisen. I can make use of one of my bans¹ for this.

I was banned on Classic for going on someone else's account and hosting events because the players were bored. My ban reason states that I "went on an account without permission and hosted events" and that might suggest I'm an account thief or that I had been doing sinister acts on the server on accounts that weren't mine. I would have known what it meant if I'd seen the reason, but people looking at my ban history, deciding on whether they should hire me or not, or whether I've got a history of doing similar acts, can look at that and say, "Well he's got a history of stealing accounts." The truth would have been that I was given the password by the player for the purpose, didn't steal his account at all, and harmlessly hosted events which I had prior experience with. There's a difference between the two reasons, and a simple message that the player receives when logging on just wouldn't go into enough detail to explain the situation.

¹ I'm not disputing a ban here, this happened a long time ago and over and done with. I'm just providing an example.

That's true, I suppose, though at this point I don't think Stefan plans to update the RC (though I guess he had a new version in the works, so maybe).