Normal Service Will Be Resumed ASAP

Long-term visitors to this blog will probably have noticed some changes in the past couple of days. Namely that whilst the content remains the same, the look of the blog has radically altered.

I’ve been using the same WordPress theme since 2010, and I thought I would freshen up the blog by replacing it with the 2025 version.

Alas, there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip…

The new theme uses a completely different way to display the site. The old WordPress “Widgets” have been replaced by WordPress “Blocks” and there is now a “Site Editor” to manipulate them. So the “Comments” widget has been replaced by the “Comments” block.

Unfortunately, I can’t get the Comments block to work properly. At the moment, on the Homepage, all posts that had comments from people earlier are displaying those comments, but the “Leave a comment” link to add new comments is not working – it’s just text without the comments form.

If you want to add a comment to a post, you can’t do it on the Homepage, you will have to open the post in its own page and then you can add a comment there.

I’ve tried to resolve this by having a dialogue with the WordPress chatbot without success. Eventually I got hold of a human via chat and he/she promised to check out my Homepage template to see if it can be fixed. That was four hours ago, and I’ve heard nothing since.

So, comments on the Homepage are broken for the moment. We’ll see whether Support can fix it for me. In the meantime, as I say, if you want to add a comment to a post, open up the post into its own window and do it there.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Addendum 21 March 2025: As I still hadn’t heard anything further from Support, I tried the Support Chat again and got connected with a human. They investigated my Homepage and found a bug that prevents the Comment Form from being displayed.

The issue will be escalated within WordPress and hopefully a fix will be forthcoming at some point. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can add a workaround text to the Homepage Template that asks people to open the blogpost in a separate page if they want to leave a comment…

Addendum 18 April 2025: Well, I think it has been fixed – the Comments Form block now seems to be working correctly on my Homepage. Hurrah!