to make this more extensable/semantic, you want to emphasize the author’s comment whether the author is known or unknown, or whether a photo exists or not.

i would revert back to your oddcomment->authcomment logic, that was solid. but instead of checking for user_id i would check for user_level, e.g. anything above user level 2. that way any author/editor/admin’s comments will be highlighted. use a default icon where the user picture would be, some illustration of an angry robot maybe.

then add a second bit of logic to append the last name of the particular (privileged) user, if known, so you would end up with, e.g. class=”authcomment darowski”

move the author name classes out into a separate stylesheet that you @import in, it will just contain last names and user images that would override the angry robot.