You will have to require registration. Otherwise how does wp know the difference between Phil and Phil? You could maybe limit Phil to one ip but what if he uses a different computer or goes to Starbucks?
Or make “our Phil” a different kind of user which will require he log in but not other Phils.
WP can tell the difference because our Phil can log in.
So if you wanted to leave a message as “Phil” then you’d either have to log in or else WP would say “Sorry ‘Phil’ is the name of a registered user, either log-in and leave a comment or enter a different name”
Hope that makes sense.
I would recommend:
1) Use Gravatars. Your registered user “Phil” will have a different email address – and therefore a different Gravatar – from anonymous commenter “Phil”.
2) Use the core-provided comment CSS classes to style differently comments from logged-in users (different background color, or border color, or even add some sort of banner or background image or :before or :after text) indicating that the comment is from a registered/logged-in user.
I would NOT recommend providing feedback to anonymous commenters regarding username, because doing so would disclose one of your WP usernames, and you may wish to keep that information private.
Cheers Chip.
Option 1 would work but only if people get the concept of Gravatars.
Seems a significant omission or error in the way comments are left. Thinking it through, you may also want a list of words that people can’t use as names such as “webmaster, site owner, administrator” etc. Otherwise it’s easy to leave a comment that the casual reader will think came from someone with some association with the site when actually it didn’t.
Agree with your comment re feedback, but the message could easily say “that name is not available, please chose another”.
