What do you think about the idea to add afk reasons.
So you write for example "/afk dinner" so it says in chat "* -Playername- is now AFK: dinner" and if you dont write an reason it just says "* -Playername- is now AFK."

/afk already takes a player param.
Would love /afkr though.

why... just seems silly

This will be great afk reasons :)
/afk im goin to poop
/afk im goin to eat...

Add this as a response when someone message a player that's afk.
If I type "/afk Just needed to make more coffee" and someone sends me a private message that player will recieve a "This player is AFK: Just needed to make more coffee".

As staff that would help a lot since if a staffmember need to run off a short time it's possible to add something like "/afk Back before " and players that login after he went afk will still know.

I've created a PR for this request. It takes out the silly part of broadcasting it to everyone by default (you can change it in locale file if you want). However, by default it will notify /msg senders why the recipient is afk, assuming the recipient has set their afk message using /afk im not actually afk.

dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/afk

We will not support any third party services. Please wait patiently for the PR to be accepted, otherwise please proceed with caution.

This has been added in 9dfa650. You can grab the feature from build 380 on the CI server.

Documentation can be found here: https://github.com/drtshock/Essentials/wiki#afk-message