I understand what you mean now and agree that would be useful in some situations. I can’t believe it isn’t already available.
Qrat, if you want to know why it’s because the users screen name is stored in the same table as the comments. This gets pulled out as the {author} instead of data being made available from the members table.
I guess my reason to have this feature is becuase the user’s screen name at the time of commenting will be permenantly attached to the comment. If a user changes their screen name their old one will still show for the comments made using it.
A permenant fix would be to modify the comment module with an SQL JOIN for the members table but I don’t need this feature right now so hopefully this feature will get implimented by the EE team.