Ok, so for now the site is wide open for commenting. I’m discovering a number of issues with running wordpress under PHP 5.0 and one of them seems to impact wordpress’s ability to send email, for things including registration, hence why registration wasn’t working when I had that turned on. I’ve got a clue on how to fix this and will post an update if I manage to get it resolved. I have managed to resolve a host of other issues related to these bugs – kudos to the wordpress trac instance as far as that goes.

Hopefully the spammers won’t go nuts on me while I work this out. If they do I’ll have to bump up anti-spam extensions in the queue of things to get installed and running.