Some of you have been experiencing issues commenting here at HB & HB. I did a little detective work (thanks to watishista Em for giving me the heads up) and it turns out that WordPress decided to “update” the commenting system and didn’t bother to announce it in advance to blog owners. Would have been nice to know, guys! Anyhow, here’s the skinny:
Howdy!
We’ve recently updated our commenting system.
Now, if someone tries to comment with an email address that’s attached to a WordPress.com account, they’ll need to sign into WordPress.com before they can comment.
If commenters have forgotten their password they can request a reset:
http://wordpress.com/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword
Please don’t hesitate to contact our Happiness Engineers if you have any questions. We’re glad to help!
They’re gonna need help if I manage to get the ear of a “Happiness Engineer” Grrrrr! Anyhow, this also affects people who have Gravatar accounts (which WordPress neglects to mention) since they have been associated since 2007. Here are the directions for dealing with that. Blog owners are having a fit about this and rightly so. I’ve already voiced my complaint and I hope they will reverse the update. So sorry for the inconvenience if you’re dealing with this issue and I’ll keep watching the Support Forum to see what workarounds they come up with. This is pretty much what I look like right now:
– Lozil
Of Headbands and Heartbreak... 
That picture of Nando is quite perfect!
Testing…testing…
It doesn’t affect you unless you have either an email associated with a WordPress or Gravatar account. If you do, you have to go and log into your account first before you can post anywhere. Very annoying!
Definitely annoying. As it means I will use a fake email now. My WP account has some 98249818 revolving blog projects on it that don’t need to be associated with my love of football players’ butts.
Maybe I will write a lil’ note to WP myself!
I can just use a different email
Fernando bitchface is scaring me
You’d think they would make it easier for their own users rather than the other way around.