I propose “asdasdasdasdas” as the default reason if you do not type or select anything.
Fair enough. We’ve got a request in to move this to the enterprise side of the product 
I would be happy to provide a reason for shutdown only if its a manual click on the UI button that triggers the prompt for the reason.
My home backup TrueNAS Scale server is scheduled to turn on once a week to pull the snapshots from my main TrueNAS Core server.
The TrueNAS Scale server has a script in a cron job to shut it down when its finished doing the replications.
So as long as I can do that in the CE edition still, I’m not fussed providing a reason to shutdown when doing it manually.
I like the idea of audit logging even on my home equipment…
I’m getting old and I’m over worked with family and work, its good to have the machines remember the reason why I did something, especially when I do it late at night and am not 100% awake 
I’d also like to put my vote in for being able to turn off the reason for shutdown. It’s annoying as a home user and hobbyist who tends to do testing requiring frequent shutdowns and restarts.
That’s the single leading by far reason why I would want to throw a Windows box out of the window. There’s nothing more annoying in Windows anywhere.
Not a heavy Windows user I take it?
Something something ten foot pole … 
I usually just end up choosing some random reason at this point which is even less helpful for developers info.
It isn’t intended for developers’ info, as noted up-thread–the info isn’t sent to iX. It’s for your info. Agree you should have the option to disable it, but if you’re shutting down your system often enough for this to really be an issue, you’re frankly doing it wrong.
I was doing some things here and there where I was shutting it down more frequently. So not doing it wrong. But generally I don’t touch it.
IMHO, the scenario of a “cold backup system” that boots up only to receive replication and shuts down when it’s done is not “doing it wrong”.
Going forward, it sure would be great if the development team(s) could make more consideration about “features” like this where it concerns Enterprise vs. Community editions.
OR maybe just, by default, build in options to enable/disable/reconfigure things so that we can use OUR servers the way WE want rather than constantly acting as though we need to be protected from ourselves?
It sure does get frustrating and TrueNAS becomes more and more of an inconvenience to use than it once was. It is things like this which have me advocating FOR TrueNAS less and less and telling folks to look more into competing products before they settle on TrueNAS.
That is a purely subjective opinion.
No, I don’t think it is. Software is designed to be used in a certain way, and using it contrary to its design, while it may work (for certain values of “work”), is going to incur challenges that wouldn’t be present if you just used it as intended.
As applicable here, TrueNAS is designed to run 24x7x365. Shutting it down frequently is simply contrary to how it’s designed to work. Of course you can do it, but you’ll be fighting the design of the system.
But this seems to be an awful lot of complaining over “pick something from a drop-down.”
Hard disagree. I’m not here to argue with elitists or evangelists.
Shutting down a machine is a simple function that shouldn’t be expected to cause problems. If it does then the product is flawed.
Tell this microsoft, even windows server requires you to give shutdown/reboot reason…
Microsoft listening to customers… lol. Thank you for the laugh, I need to wake up.
And, as described up-thread, this can apparently be disabled in Windows Server.
True.
I don’t see how that’s relevant. This isn’t Windows. Nor does TrueNAS need to emulate Windows.