I'm kind of stumped... Have the "Comments Closed" thing going on with my site. At some point comments were working because I have some spam comments waiting for clearance or dismissal.
I installed ultimate facebook with thought of using the FB commenting module which is what uncovered the problem.
It's apparently not Ultimate per se, because I restored the site back to pre-installation state and it still shows the same way.
Maybe I am just a noob and have something configured wrongly, but Discussion settings seem to be what you would expect.
WP ver 3.52 (some plugs not ready for 3.8)
Tried turning off all plugins - no change.
Tried default 2013/12 theme - no change.
??
Thx.