The point of that particular item in the article was to eliminate the conditional logic for these display items from the place that it occurs: in the views. Mak

The point of that particular item in the article was to eliminate the conditional logic for these display items from the place that it occurs: in the views. Make the goal to get rid of all the places where you want to put <% if ... %> in your view code. So rather than add even more logic to determine if it's the guest user or not to decide if you're displaying your reply button how about adding a method to your User object that returns the markup for your reply button? Then in the guest object make that return some kind of placeholder markup that isn't the reply button. The problem as I see it are complex view files that mix html (yeah, I know there are other templating options) with a whole bunch of conditional programming code. The cognitive load to try and understand if the html is correct (are all those tags closed properly?) combined with all that conditional logic quickly becomes overwhelming.