Is a public whipping of spammers too harsh?

Some rat bastard loaded several megs of comment spam into biohabit.org in about three hours. Thankfully a few mysql commands were able to purge all the spam. As a result of this new spamming technique I have disabled anonymous comments as with all of the work I have been doing on peak oil and permaculture I'm not going to have time or interest to deal with the above mentioned rat bastards for a while.