One of my customers has a Wordpress site/blog.  He asked me why one of his readers was unable to comment.  I went into his site and noticed that there were 17 updates needed for his site.  Once those are finished what plug-in typically prevents people from being able to comment.  Akismet is one of the plug-ins that needs to be updated.  

Unless the page itself doesn’t have the “comments” option checked, where else do I check?

Thanks @kristi-hines for the response.  I went out to test and realized that the blog requires a log-in to post a comment.  From what I read about Akismet, it doesn’t create the log-in to comment option, just scans for scams. None of the other plug-ins that I see on his site have anything to do with commenting on blogs.  Could it be in his theme?

I don’t see a captcha.

That did the trick @richardmclaughlin  I will have to learn to check settings from now on.  I am still learning my way around wordpress and thanks to everyone in this forum, it is making it much easier!!!!

I agree with  @kristi-hines about making it easy for people to comment. I do moderate first time commenters. I put a message explaining that fact between the bottom of the message box and the submit button so (hopefully) people understand that.

I have considered removing that barrier and just allowing everyone to post but adding a Captcha or math question to prevent the bots. 

I get about as many comments as I can answer now.