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The comment system is using captcha and it is slightly more restrictive than it used to be... because we had in excess of 12k spam comments put on stories in about two and a half months earlier this year. So after spending the time cleaning it up, I had to set it to be more restrictive. If your browser is blocking access to the captcha check, you're not going to be able to make comments on the stories directly. You can still post comments in the forums thread for any given story... in fact, that's 'ideal' because comments directly attached to stories can often be missed entirely once a story is more than a couple months old... because most people (even the authors) don't get notified when new comments are posted... so once they stop looking actively, new comments can be completely missed. But with the forums, its easier to see new posts (and to subscribe to a thread to get updates when someone comments).

*nods*

I spent some time working with it and the captcha system seems to be completely broken. I've disabled the need for captcha for registered users for comments, but I can't turn it off for public / guests without ending up with a huge spam problem. I'll continue to work on it as time allows; but it may be something that will have to wait. Captcha has moved on to newer versions than what our code uses... and it may just be that they simply aren't compatible right now. Moving to the new code base/version would fix that, but there's a LOT of other work necessary before we can make that transition...