Michael, thank you for the pointers. I am a PHP newbie, trying to resolve an issue that appears to be with the discussion plugin. As pointed out the "comments" to a discussion item are not showing up, unless I use the "Moderate Discussions" feature. This occurs in my "production system" with PHP 7.4 or my test system with PHP 8.2.7. Both systems are using the latest version of Dokuwiki. The ptln() function appears "simple". ptln() as you pointed out, is a function provided in deprecated.php. There is another instance of a ptln() function in ./vendor/splitbrain/php-cli/src/Colors.php: public function ptln($line, $color, $channel = STDOUT) But since it is buried in the Colors class, I will assume PHP deals with that appropriately. Being a PHP newbie and my ancient experience is with machine code, Assembly, C, C++, Java, ... , I am not aware of the syntax features of PHP. Reading the "echo" documentation was interesting. Which leads me to reading the php code in the discussion plugin.
A BIG weakness is not understanding/seeing the precedence of the "set of things (classes, functions) " that are being processed (loaded/evaluated) by PHP. My next step will probably be: Add debug statements to the discussion plugin. What is your opinion about "the way to debug PHP" ? One of my code reading surprises was seeing variables declared/set within {} and used outside the {}.
I did notice "somebody else" has a similar problem with the discussion plugin.
Thank you for listening to this forum and offering comments.