WordPress.com made a change to how comments work last week. This is causing problems for some people trying to leave comments on WordPress.com blogs and is getting a stream of complaints. I have gotten a few messages from people about this issue myself.
In the grand WordPress.com tradition, no mention of this change to comments was made before it started causing problems, and since then it has been getting little or no visible attention from what passes for support. They might want to look into some ideas on that front.
Just a suggestion...
Anyway, it seems that if you have ever made an account at WordPress.com or any of its affiliated services, such as Gravatar, the email address you used has been stored away somewhere and you are now required to log into WordPress.com if you enter an email address that matches one in the database.
Even if you have since attempted to delete your account.
You can enter your email address in the lost password page at WordPress.com to see if you have an address that has been assimilated into the database.
Since I do not actually check the email addresses people use, unless somebody asks me to contact them, feel free to make up a fake email address to comment. I won’t mind and would rather have your comment than an accurate email address.
I will enable anonymous comments in the mean time. I don’t mind anonymous comments, but for some reason the need to enter an email address makes some people behave better.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
They really need to stop screwing with basic features and just focus on trying to pimp out their ‘premium’ themes.
LikeLike
According to some comments in the thread you linked, even anonymous comments won’t work if you have ever at any time registered a WordPress or Gravatar account. Possibly even if you haven’t.
LikeLike
I’m in a catch 22 situation, too. I lost my login on my notebook, and couldn’t post because “the email address was registered, please log in”. Needless to say, I couldn’t, and when I tried to get a password reminder to that address, I couldn’t, either, because there was “no account registered with that address”. If they could at least decide!
For now, I still have a cookie’d login on my desktop. Let’s see whether I can get the login to work again before I lose that, too.
LikeLike
To make it clear, by “lost my login” I simply meant I got logged out, so I’d have to log in again.
LikeLike
@flosch – Yes, people have been mentioning similar things in that thread on the subject which I linked. The WP.com rep did say that if you got stuck, you should contact them, though they were not clear on which path to use. Clearly you cannot open a support ticket, as that requires you to log in.
LikeLike
If this gets through, you can add a +wordpress or whatever to the front of your email and it’ll get by. Might be a gmail only thing not sure.
LikeLike
Well, that explains the complaints I’ve been getting lately about people not being able to post comments. Thanks WP, great job there.
LikeLike
I have a WordPress.com account, which I am perpetually signed into. I comments almost daily on several WordPress.com blogs, and have not had any issues, which according to the post above, I shouldn’t be able to comment. Heck, I wasn’t even aware there was an issue until a few days ago when I saw mention of it on Twitter. The .com blogs I post on also seem to have the same amount of comment traffic as before.
LikeLike
@Deb – No. If you are perpetually logged in, you should not have problems commenting.
The problem mentioned above says that if you cannot post without logging in if you try to leave a comment using an email address that was ever associated with a wordpress.com account. That would be a completely different issue from what you seem to have understood.
LikeLike
Whoops! My bad! I totally read that as you can’t post comments if you are logged in or using an address ever registered with them. *facepalm* lol
LikeLike
@Deb – That’s the ticket!
This spurred me to go check the thread on the forums about this issue. Still no update, but I really did not expect one.
Good luck on your plan.
LikeLike
Thanks. Things like this are one of the reasons my site is WP self-hosted. Aside from the fact you gain complete control over your site’s functions and appearance, the WP.org community tends to be more helpful, though you need to be able to help yourself as well.
Now I’ve got to see what your blog here is about- I honestly just pulled you up on a Google search for “wordpress.com commenting issue” and haven;t even looked around yet.
LikeLike
Pingback: How to Comment on a WordPress Blog without Signing-in | Joan Y. Edwards