Clarification on who is perma'ed and who isn't.

[Laith]

Oh, oh, can I go crazy and [try to] kill everyone? That sounds fun!

[Lycodrake]

I don't have enough meat on my bones to be sustenance!

[Tobias]

you say not much meat, I say good source of lean protein.

[Mcjon01]

Wasn't that. (And yes, banned people can show they're online if they're actually attempting to use the site, so that's not a valid marker anyway.)

As he pointed out, what I did was make banned users (whether temporary or permanent - again, there is no way to differentiate the two that I know of as not even vBulletin differentiates them) red and struckthrough. There is no way for a normal user to duplicate this and have it server-side short of basically hacking the site.

The "Banned" party is, for all intents and purposes, over.

Wait, are you saying that for temp-bans, you actually have to keep track of the time left on the ban and undo it manually? That seems... obnoxiously tedious.

[Tobias]

no, its just a tool that we set to undue the ban. Perm is just when we set the tool to "never". Functionally they are the same otherwise.

[Raven2785]

poutine!

You bastard! you reminded me of the existence of that wonderful orgy of fries and cheese I can't get on a daily basis. Damn you.

[Mcjon01]

Then there is a distinction. You just have to look at the timer instead of the user group.

[Petrikow]

Hehehehehehehe

[Tobias]

Then there is a distinction. You just have to look at the timer instead of the user group.

Not possible.

[Mcjon01]

Plugins aren't allowed to reference that data?

[Tobias]

iunno, DP tried to explain it to me once, I didn't understand much. but I still felt confident in saying it because I think either me or RB raised that exact point when we had this conversation about a week after becoming mods. Long and short, of it, the banned setting can be configured over, but the time configuration tool couldn't without basically rebuilding several entire parts of v-bulletin and quite possibly crashing the whole server

[Mcjon01]

The fact that you'd have to reconfigure the entire timer tool just to have a third-party plugin even look at it is mind-boggling. The hell were the vbulletin devs smoking?

[Tobias]

Well they were programmers for cheap software, so ditch weed probably. The medicine cocktail they stole out of their grandma's cabinet then washed down with bottom shelf tequila might have had a few winners in it though.

[Bittersweet]

Well it's got to be better than phpBB.

[Kyte]

The fact that you'd have to reconfigure the entire timer tool just to have a third-party plugin even look at it is mind-boggling. The hell were the vbulletin devs smoking?

Actually given you can see the ban expiration date in the "You're banned" page it should be accessible but loldunno.
Wait one sec.

Code

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `infractionban` (
  `infractionbanid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `usergroupid` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `banusergroupid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `amount` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `period` char(5) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `method` enum('points','infractions') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'infractions',
  PRIMARY KEY (`infractionbanid`),
  KEY `usergroupid` (`usergroupid`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `userban` (
  `userid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `usergroupid` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `displaygroupid` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `usertitle` varchar(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `customtitle` smallint(6) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `adminid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `bandate` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `liftdate` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `reason` varchar(250) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  PRIMARY KEY (`userid`),
  KEY `liftdate` (`liftdate`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Well that's easy to pull.
'course I dunno how many hoops does vB make you jump through to pull info straight from DB and show it in the userbox.
...
One sec.

Didn't find one but oh wow look what I found.
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=270517
Remember when you said MediaWiki would work if you could make'em share login? Well someone else thought the same.

[Tangerang]

you say that now, but wait till you try my original style Canadian poutine!

I thought you were a texan

[Tobias]

its canadian style because I was going to use canadian meat.

[Bittersweet]

Oh no is Tobias is McBain???

[Tobias]

Question my jokes again and you will find I am McPAIN!!!

[Polly]

That was a horrible pun, Tobias, as expected of you.