Apologies for the inconvenience we’ve given all of you over the past few days. I know commenting suddenly became a huge pain. The reason was spam.

We were getting a new spam comment on this blog at the rate of one per second.  (I cannot say how much I hate spamming as a business practice, and could indulge in a good long rant on the subject, but will not.) The point is that this influx was sucking up resources and getting us into overage charges territory with our hosting service.

Our intrepid webmaster put out the fire a couple of days back by making it hard to comment We’ve had no spam at all as a result. That is good.  But no one is happy with the draconian commenting protocols. So we’re trying something new.

Now, commenting is back to our usual system, but we’re closing down comments on older posts. We have a library of 2,522 posts on Root Simple as of today–crazy, huh?– and that’s a whole lot of territory for spammers to mine.

This solution not ideal, because we like how conversations continue to develop over the course of years on old posts, but on the other hand, it’s not a terrible solution, either. Our alternative is to swallow higher monthly charges and do a lot of rather expensive fussing around with the site, so we’re going to try this out for now and see how it goes.

Thanks for your patience, and back to our regularly scheduled program…