In practice in econsensus, all Comment authors should be authenticated users (so comment.user will be an User object), however, note that the Comment model does allow 'user' to be null, so you may want to deal with that case gracefully, just in case it happens somehow. See how we're doing it for Feedback 'author' above, providing some fallback text to display if we have no 'author'. According to comments in django/contrib/comments/models.py, we can reasonably expect to have something in 'user_name' if there's no 'user', so consider falling back to that. Because the Comments model is part of Django, it's trickier to do this than for Feedback, so either use template logic, or consider writing a [custom template filter](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/howto/custom-template-tags/#writing-custom-template-filters) to return comment.user or comment.user_name?