Moderation of apparent trolling

As a mod, I can see banned comments (though not deleted ones). The user's comments visible to me on the page (there are three) are all heavily downvoted, all banned, and all unadulterated crap. Example:

fucking web 2.0 bullshit - karma system

thanks for the heads up - obviously im too firey for here

I will keep to my dark corners - just wanted to bitch @ wowk - i don;t like him nearly as much as I don;t like you.

Do you really HAVE TO reply to every post you see about cryonics on the internetwith your stupid pro-cryonics propaganda? - I really hope that the free suspension you were promised "for all your good work" is worth it. One Day Skywalker you will grow up and realise that you wasted your time - time you could of spent honing your Jedi skills for the pickled egg war that is coming.

I'll quote the other two if people want the content (and unban them if people feel very strongly that I ought), but I really think there is no loss here - this is somewhere between spam, personal abuse, and trolling.

Given that the user in question was trolling and had all comments reduced to very negative values, what most likely happened is that the user was banned. Sometimes when users are banned the most insulting or trolliish comments are deleted when the user is banned. Note also that all the comments are available here. Considering the level of insulting vitriol in the comments, outright deletion seems like a completely reasonable response. I don't think comments that say things like:

Long time lurker - why you even bother arguing with Cryonics people - they are a delusional cult, technophilliacs who barely understand what cryonics ACTUALLY IS but they are still selling it to others. Bwowk is one of the main guys in the cryogame who writes tonnes of litreture to twist up the heads of people with a 140 IQ and make them belive that they have made the right choice with cryonics. He has been doing it for years and years - Melody is not wrong about 1 million words

is at all helping the signal to noise ratio.

For what it is worth, calm, careful negative comments about cryonics are generally accepted. See for example my comment in this thread.

Deletion of comments by richiekgb is simply letting the eldest Billy Goat Gruff do his job.

I didn't ban them, and whichever mod did, I support them fully. See Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.

We need the following features on LW:

1) Banned comments no longer appear on user pages. Otherwise spammers have a motive to spam in order to steal pagerank.

2) When a comment is banned or goes to say -4 or below, but not when that comment is deleted, subcomments of it no longer appear in the Recent Comments feed. This will help ensure that stupid discussions ACTUALLY GET PRUNED rather than going on forever.

3) Automatic warning when a user posts a comment falling under 2.

4) Automatic warning when a user tries to delete a comment that already has subcomments, which people seem to do by accident a lot.

I don't appreciate the absurd insinuations of the title of this post, or having my time spent on revisiting that gibberish.

(The property of being "critical of cryonics" holds much less explanatory power about the reasons for comments' deletion than the quality of their content; one of the links included in the post itself includes a copy of one of the comments, so it seems like the author had access to that information at the time of posting.)

On a forum with a working downvote mechanism, deleting non-spam or non-basilisks is indefensible. Another reason why LW should have an public censorship policy.