Comments not working with 1.5.1 (vs. Commenting)

I've recently migrated my installation to a new server, and I've been experimenting with both the Comments and Commenting Plug-ins. The Commenting plug-in works just fine, but the Comments plug-in won't let any posts through. The page doesn't even re-load when I try to click on the "add new" button. Has this plug-in been deprecated for version 1.5.1, with Commenting in its stead? I would like to use Comments instead of Commenting since it doesn't require users to add an email address, etc. when adding a comment (it's a private collection with a lot of older folks for users, so simpler is better). I tried de-activating, uninstalling, and then re-installing Comments, but to no avail (and yes, Commenting is disabled while I try this). Any suggestions?

The Comments plugin was developed by a group outside of CHNM, and so we don't really know if it is being maintained or developed.

Commenting was developed at CHNM to address some additional needs that Comments didn't handle, in particular connecting with ReCaptcha and Akismet for spam filtering.

And so, the two plugins are on separate development tracks.

That said, in Commenting it might be possible to remove the email (and other) requirements. If you go into the CommentForm.php file, you could remove the validator settings for the email address by deleting the validator part of the array that looks like this:

$emailOptions = array(
                'label'=>'Email',
                'required'=>true,
                'validators' => array(
                    array('validator' => 'EmailAddress'
                    )
                )
            );

Or, you could remove the email field altogether by commenting out or removing

$this->addElement('text', 'author_email', $emailOptions);

I haven't tested this, so I think it is likely that the database settings will complain that there is no email address. That might be solved by changing the database definition to allow author_email to be NULL. That could happen either by directly changing the column definition, or by changing the setting in the CommentingPlugin::hookInstall() method.

Lots of approaches there, but we can probably find a direction that works.