Some examples from my online week:

trackback on this site for “international calling cards”
88 spam comments this week (I only posted twice)
including some sneaky ones, like “I hadn’t heard of this before!  I will be back for sure!” from “00211234@gmail.com”
went to a website yesterday that told me I had a “virus” and had a pop up [...]

Image by premasagar via Flickr

There are a lot of plugins out there to help with the old commenting function in WordPress.  We had all manor of ajax plugins, and nested comments plugins, plus the email-the-user and subscribe-to-thread plugins.  Here is a list of the functionality that is now INCLUDED with WordPress 2.7.x.

Ajax loading of reply-to-comment [...]

And perhaps you want the comments closed?  I wouldn’t blame you.
If you scroll down in your write>post screen there is a section called “Advanced Options”.  This is for you! Let’s go through them:

Excerpt: This will override other excerpts of this post on the archives or category pages.  Click on the arrow and insert the excerpt [...]

Is your theme gravatar-enabled?  If it is, you’ll see a small image in each comment.
Gravatars are images that represent your online presence anywhere on the internet.  Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatars.
With WP 2.6 we can now include a default image that matches your site instead of the little grey head.  We can set the [...]