JComments generating error code 500 in visitor logs

[joomgary]

I tried posting this question/problem at joomlatune but got 403 errors.

Server error code 500 has suddenly begun to appear in my visitor logs. JComments still appears to be working because I have received a few spam comments successfully. The error code appears any time an article is opened, usually 3 times every time an article is opened. Even from IP's that are banned and should be showing a 403 code I notice the 500 code instead. Error console gives this data:

Use of getAttributeNode() is deprecated. Use getAttribute() instead. mootools-core.js:343:94
ReferenceError: JComments is not defined
1191-tiger-bee-fly-xenox-tigrinus:196:5
ReferenceError: JCommentsEditor is not defined
1191-tiger-bee-fly-xenox-tigrinus:255:6

the actual data will vary depending on the article opened.

My research seems to show the problem started after I made some errors in my .htaccess file which caused a global site server error. I fixed that problem and my site now works normally except for these 500 error codes showing up. I re-examined my .htaccess and other than some additional "deny from" being added, nothing else has changed. Here are some visitor log examples:

xxx.xx.xx.133 - - [14/Aug/2017:06:39:46 -0400] "GET /components/com_jcomments/tpl/default/style.css?v=3002 HTTP/1.1" 500 519 "http://mywebsite.org/index.php/about-us ... ge-article" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0"

199.30.25.15 - - [06/Aug/2017:08:37:22 -0400] "GET /components/com_jcomments/tpl/default/style.css?v=3002 HTTP/1.1" 500 519 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 BingPreview/1.0b"

I am running Joomla! 2.5.28, JComments Component 3.0.5

Note: JComments was working normally with these versions previously.