How would a suspension system work?

[Dj-Dark-1]

Hello everyone, I am currently creating my own forums and I am quite far in.

I have made a report page for users to report bad posts or topics e.g. spam. It inserts the data into a database. Moderators and Administrators have access to the Moderation Queue which displays all these reports and they have power to act on them.

They have quite a few options on the moderate page e.g. delete post, delete topic, close topic, hide post from user view. They can also affect the user e.g. Give a warning (PM warning), Ban the user from the site and deliver a post/level loss.

This is turn inserts the effect into a database and a user has a moderation history to see their previous offenses and so moderators can see if they have any history and how harsh the punishment should be. That isn't the problem.

To get to the point:

How would I go about making a suspension system so if a moderator suspends a user for x amount of days that it acts as if they are banned for several days but they would be back to normal after x days.

Is it possible to insert a timestamp into a database and after this date and time has been reached the suspension would automatically remove itself.

Sorry if I am not being too specific but does anyone have any ideas,

Thanks in advance, Dj.

[big_nerd]

I would recommend the easiest way would be to put in a field in MySQL called suspend_until allowing NULL.

If the field is NULL then they can login as normal, if they are banned for X Number of days it will keep them banned until then.

Once the user is able to log in again and does so - you will update the DB to put the suspend_until to be NULL again.

Does that make sense?