I support this. I often perform maintenance in small wikis where spam is rampant, and blocking multiple users is cumbersome when one has to triple the clicks needed to get it done (one to reveal the dropdown list, the other to pick the duration, and the third to click the "block" button), compared to, say, deleting pages.

Is it possible to gather data on what's the most common block duration chosen? (I'm willing to bet it's not "other".)

We don't record that it is a "other" choice in the db (from memory). But yes, if we really wanted to, we could probably get someone to scan this data from the cluster (Might actually be possible from the TS).

patch submitted here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/10469/

On gerrit, Aaron Schulz commented "I don't like giving IPs a default block time of indefinite. These needs a bit more thought IMO."

I agree; I wasn't too keen on making the default indefinite either. What if we made it configurable through a system message, which would default to the same as [[MediaWiki:ipbother]]? This would retain current behavior, but make it configurable by administrators of the site :)

Sorry, ipbother is not the appropriate message for what I meant. It should be [[Mediawiki:htmlform-selectorother-other]].

Ok, since nobody commented, I went ahead and implemented this. The new system message is "ipb-default-expiry" and it's an empty string by default (otherwise it would fill in the custom value box). Thus the current behavior is preserved, but by editing [[MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry]], admins can change the default block expiry, for example by setting it to "infinite".

The new patch is on Gerrit, on the same link mentioned in comment #4.

Marking as fixed as this was just merged into the master git branch as change-id Icb1edabd8bb3dd1020c023b27b1270b9d2735b06