The problem on the blog with spam and other comments yesterday has been fixed. Turns out it was actually a problem with the host, and not local to this blog.

When glitches like that happen, a blogger never can be sure where the source is. It didn’t initially occur to me this time that the source was the host, because in the past that has meant the whole blog has gone down (perish the hateful thought). This time everything was working okay except the spam blocker, which was now putting all comments—spam and real—into moderation. I get a lot of comments here, but I get a lot more spam—ordinarily between 5 and 10 thousand spam comments a day. To sort through that without an effective spam blocker would be a full-time job and more.

Anyway, everything seems to have been fixed, and comments are posting as usual.