The Comments on our news stories have disappeared. Poof. Gone. And, this time, we didn't pull the plug on them for bad behavior by our commenters. In fact, we didn't pull the plug on them at all.

They just up and went away.

We utilize a third-party provider, HaloScan, to host the comments that we attach daily to the stories on our website.

Over the weekend, HaloScan updated its site to add a new anti-spam filter that would help all its customers block the garbage that plagues almost everyone in the online open source community. Unfortunately, HaloScan's block conflicted somehow with the script we instituted about a month ago to drive our comments through our site registration.

To make a long story short (primarily because I don't understand it enough to be able to tell you the longer story), HaloScan's filter believed all the Comments from our site were spam and blocked them.

We just got them to figure out the problem late this afternoon. They are building a list of sites that they will allow to pass through their new filter. We're on the list. But it may be a day or so before they implement it.

In the meantime, hold that thought.