As of 6:20 PM Saturday, September 3, my tech guy has finished working on this web site. It was up and down for a couple hours while the work was performed, and there was a period where a MySQL error appeared, but all seems good now.
The comments section - hacked out of existence - is back. It also seems to work better than before.
The premium content locking system works.
So it appears things are back to normal.