I have today added a small update which allows people to see some generic information about commenters who have no public profile/diaries. This is a start to help redress that balance that ironically free users potentially have a little more privacy than paid (though this is somewhat by choice since paid users don't necessarily have to go public).

The information is relatively generic because I don't feel we should be leaking too much information for private users, but I do agree that a little 'statistical' information can help diarists decide the potential motivations associated with a new user comment on their diary from a user who has no other public profile.

Clicking the username of a commenter who has no public profile will now pop up some statistics about that user, notably roughly how long they've been with us, when they were last active, how many comments they've left and on how many diaries.

Hopefully this strikes the right balance.

I will be adding the ability to block readers from commenting and updating the visibility of diarists diaries to add another setting that prevents worldwide readability and only allowing logged in users to read, hopefully fairly shortly.

But, I have a very lengthy undertaking going on in the background at the moment and I don't want to make big codebase changes to the live site if at all possible because this lengthy undertaking would require the same updates to be made manually to it, so that nothing gets lost... I'm not giving too much detail as yet, but it should produce something exciting in the future!