What happened to the [banned] tag?

As usual I couldn't figure out where to post this, but I certainly didn't want to clog up Ady's thread again.

Jay said:

Topic cleaned. As always, user bans will follow for those who can't play nice from here on out.

And yes, the forum is still moderated. Some of us have jobs. Use the ignore feature, skip over ugly posts, have a beer, or do whatever else you have to do to get yourself through the day.

So this reminded me of something I wanted to ask.  What happened to the [banned] tag?  Has everyone been let back in (seems unlikely), or did the tags just get ditched?

When your adjustments are complete will we still be able to read the comments of banned users up until the point they began their offending behaviour?

Sadly some users who go off the rails start off with posts which contain useful information or suggestions and blanking out all of their posts can seriously derail the flow of a thread.

I understand the need to not encourage people to start an account and then abuse that privilage by flouting the rules but removing large chunks of possibly useful suggestions has the unintended effect of punishing the users who keep within the rules.

It must be possible to isolate a cut off point and grey out or delete all posts starting from the offending comments?

++UPDATE++

The greying out to the point of illegibility may not be a deliberate design feature as Adywan has pointed out (in the bug section) those posts are still legible in Internet Exploder but they are almost impossible to read in Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Semi-related follow up.

Would it make sense to have a BANNED thread announcing when someone is banned and (more importantly) why they were banned?  I've been seeing a few questions about Darth Venal being banned, and while I can sort of see what happened with his attitude, I'm not sure if that was the only reason for his banning.  Also, I have seen a few "wait, he was banned?" posts from people who didn't even know.

It might help cut down on all the ban questions.