Thanks to those of you who alerted me to the problem with the “comments” function that cropped up in the past day or so.

I don’t know exactly what the problem is, but I know how it happened.

Last week, I was notified that the site was plastered with SEO spam, hidden links that were invisible to me, but that boosted the Google rankings of other referenced sites, mostly with, well, less than savory subjects.

At one point, my hosting service was ready to suspend my account if I didn’t get the site cleaned up. I spent several days between tech support at my hosting service and techies at the separate company that manages the firewall for the site. Eventually the site came up clean.

But there were additional instructions. Make sure WordPress and plug-ins are up to date. Okay. I updated WordPress to the latest version, then turned to plug-ins. I ditched unused plug-ins, updated those that were activated.

Somewhere among those changes I managed to do something that is blocking comments from displaying properly.

So far, the comments still exist. When I sign in as site administrator, the comments are visible to me. But although individual posts have a note saying how many comments have been submitted, but they aren’t displaying properly.

Hey, if there are any gurus who recognize this problem and how to solve it on self-hosted WordPress sites, any advice or suggestions would be appreciated. Otherwise, I’ll be searching online hoping to find the magic solution.