[Issue finally resolved on Thursday. See note #2 at bottom.]

I had a couple of reports from readers who said they were blocked from leaving comments today.

So I reassured them that I would post anything that they wanted to email me. I spoke too soon.

When I went to post the comments, I got the same error message.

Here’s what we saw:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /wordpress/wp-comments-post.php on this server.

Anyway, if you’ve tried to leave a comment and found yourself left out in the cold, you’re not alone. I’ve reported the glitch to my hosting service and am awaiting word back from them.

Update: Problems with comments and mail continue through Thursday while techs at my hosting service try to figure out what went wrong when they replaced some equipment a couple of days ago. Pretty frustrating.

Update #2: The issue was finally resolved late on Thursday. Here’s the brief explanation from tech support.

I found that there was line of code in your .htaccess file blocking the wp-comment.php file. It looks like it was added as part of a security implementation to prevent comment abuse on the site. I have commented this line of code out and it seems to have corrected the issue.