Requested feature overview description.

For rule-breaking comments that have received neutral/negative feedback from the moderation team:

• Mark them with conspicuous warning text, such as appending (USER WAS WARNED/SUSPENDED/BANNED FOR THIS COMMENT) to the end of the comment with a link to the relevant User Feedback log entry.
• Ideally, the warning text and the link to the feedback log entry could be automatically generated and appended to the offending comment as part of the existing ticket/feedback process, to save the moderators some time when they're reviewing reported comments.
• (added later: prevent the user from making any further modifications/edits to the offending comment, to avoid instances of the user changing the text to feign innocence, talking back at the staff, or adding additional offending content)
• Add some type of flag to the offending comment and offer an account setting to automatically hide comments with that flag, similar to the existing comment score threshold setting.
• Ideally, this flag would be applied to the comment automatically, as part of the existing ticket/feedback process (I have no idea what the moderator interface pages look like).
• This setting should be off by default, so that new users and users who aren't logged in will see comments that were rule-breaking and that those comments were punished.

Potentially, these features could also be extended to the discussion forum, but I don't know what the back end for these systems looks like or how feasible it would be.

Why would it be useful?

This is more detail about the problem--skip to the next bolded line for a #summary of the benefits.

To my understanding, rule-breaking comments on posts remain in place and visible unless they receive enough downvotes to fall below the score threshold (default for auto-hide is -2, I think).

This means rule-breaking comments can linger for quite some time (especially on older posts), between:

• some posts being infrequently visited, meaning that offending comments don't get seen,
• user uncertainty/apathy about voting down offending comments, meaning that it takes forever to/never hits the auto-hide threshold, and/or
• user uncertainty/apathy about reporting rule-breaking comments, meaning that moderators aren't made aware of the offending comments, or get multiple reports about comments that were already reviewed (I assume--I'm not clear if the system allows comments to be reported multiple times).
• the Code of Conduct instructs against reporting comments that are over 6 months old, as does forum #260551, which talks about about what and when to report (or not report, in this case).
• This in particular creates a situation where rule-breaking comments become de facto immune to moderator action once they become too old, and dependent entirely on user votes to show community disapproval--which isn't always reliable, as mentioned above.

In remaining visible and not having any readily-apparent signs of moderator action, the comments come off as having tacit 'approval', by virtue of not already being removed or visibly marked as rule-breaking/offending. This passively encourages the unwanted behavior, because users see other rule-breaking comments with positive or zero votes, don't realize they're bad, and think they're free to make similar comments. Rationalizations by users might include things like:

• "If it's so bad, why haven't the moderators done anything about it?"
• "It's not that bad, or people would have downvoted it to oblivion by now."
• "This comment from a long time ago is still up, and I don't want to waste the moderators' time reporting something so old."

Summary

By conspicuously marking the comment as rule-breaking/offending and acted upon by moderators:

• Users will see that a comment was bad and was punished, discouraging them from making similar comments.
• The expected norms of behavior will be passively reinforced, with users seeing regular reminders in the form of bad comments that have been punished. This applies especially to new users, who aren't fully familiar with the site yet.
• This will extend even to unregistered users and users who aren't logged in, who will see what unwanted/rule-breaking behavior looks like and develop an understanding even before officially joining the site.
• Users will know right away that a comment has already been addressed by the mod team, and therefore can avoid spamming the ticket queue with redundant reports.
• forum #260555 describes a way to check the User Feedback log to see if a comment has been acted upon, but as of this writing the post is out-of-date, and the process described is slightly cumbersome.

By linking the conspicuous warning message to the relevant entry in the User Feedback log:

• Users will be able to refer easily to the moderator's rationale, improving transparency between the user base and the moderation team.
• Each warning message will be tied to the specific User Feedback log entry. This will prevent bad actors from adding the warning message themselves and claiming that they are being excessively targeted by the moderators, because they will not have a log entry to link to.
• Users will be made generally aware of the User Feedback system, allowing them to browse, explore, and educate themselves about problematic behavior (hopefully) without costing the moderation team any additional time.

By offering users an account setting to hide rule-breaking/offending comments:

• Users can choose to improve their browsing experience, by not having to read troll/creepy/role-playing (RP) or otherwise offending comments.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?

• Submission post pages
• Comments on post pages
• User account settings page
• Moderator tools pages
• User Feedback log page