Good evening Paul and welcome to the Events Calendar Support forum!
Thank you for reaching out to us.
I would love to help you with this topic.
As a first troubleshooting step, could you please provide us with your complete system information in a private reply using the instructions found in the following link?
https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/
Secondly, to make sure we are indeed talking about the same thing, could you send me a screenshot of where you have the “allow user reactions” option ?
I just want to confirm if that is the “allow comments” option or a different one.
If it is indeed the “allow comments” option, you are right, that option is not available for front-end users. However, you can set it to default to “allow” under Settings > Discussion in the back-end of WordPress.
Let me know if that helps.
Have a great day!
Geoff B.