User's suspension period has expired, but they're still suspended?

Question

I came across a user with a notification that states:

This account is temporarily suspended network-wide. The suspension period ends on Dec 2 '18 at 2:35.

Screencap for posterity:

Unless this user is suspended until 2118 (in which case the full year should be shown, or at least a tooltip), it seems like they should have been unbanned 4 months ago.

Answer 1

If a user is suspended until 2118 network-wide, SE is saying: go away; nothing short of cryogenic stasis can save you, and if you do that we don't promise to let you come back anyway.

That's not "temporary".

We should give the community managers a non-hacky way to suspend an account permanently, instead of them having to just pick a large number. In those cases the message should say "suspended" or "indefinitely suspended", not "temporarily suspended", and exclude the date.

This wouldn't preclude them from issuing a long, not-permanent suspension if they really want to, but in those kinds of cases they're more likely to pick a decade or two, not more than a century, so there won't be ambiguity. And even if there is, it'd be a really rare case at that point.

Answer 2

While offering solutions, why not show the full year if the suspension lasts longer than 'til 2099? The first year after that would, with the current system, be rendered as (basing off the question)

Dec 2 '0(0?) at 2:35

Which, if the suspension happened this year, would appear to have been 19 years ago, and lead to additional bug reports like this one. What I'm suggesting is rendering that as something like:

Dec 2, 2100 at 2:35

Which also makes it look a lot more natural, without kicking in for anything aside the extreme cases where the suspensions are that long. Unlike the other suggestion, this would also leave out any form of counter, which may or may not affect server performance*.

And, in my opinion, it's slightly more expressive than "in 99.8 years"

_{*: Given one update per month, it would likely take thousands of people with that long suspensions before there's any noticeable impact on performance. Don't quote me on this though, I don't have any data to back that up}

Answer 3

May I suggest the following amendment:

This account is temporarily suspended network-wide. The suspension will expire in 99.8 years.

It seems excessive, teetering on absurdity, to actually state the clock time when a suspension (i.e, a life-long ban) extends to more or less a hundred years. The counter need only reflect the passing of each month.

There's probably a very good programming reason why this solution is unfeasible, an explanation might help the clueless like me

Answer 4

As of 2022 - years across the site are in 4 digits. While enough time has passed that I can't find/remember the original poster mentioned, I've checked through a random selection of users who are suspended and verified this is the case.

For suspensions that end in a short period, the number of days is shown

For longer suspensions (I'm not sure if this is decided by the end of the current month or total length), it shows the month and year if it ends within the current calendar year

For suspensions ending after the current calendar year and before the year 9999 AD

It shows the date and year in 4 digits.

I suspect we won't be banning anyone for 800 years or more, so I think there should be no more ambiguity for suspensions that cross over into the next century. I think the next millennia is a problem for another time :D