Eve of the Apocalypse: Twilight

Is there any way to identify if a certain account is banned?
It should be made visible by a change of his rank and maybe a special bar ( the green blocks for normal users ).

Create a topic where you announce all (temporary) bans and the reason for it.
It is important to the community after all.

While bans aren't formally private, I try to operate under a principle of least embarrassment: A ban is a remedial (albeit inescapably punitive) measure, and announcing a ban does not serve its purpose. While I realize that a thread can degenerate if a poster is banned during the thread's period of activity, such situations have been infrequent, and will hopefully remain so.

A user who wishes to make his status known has outside means of communicating with other users (and, on request, I will post on behalf of a banned user).