another new member story

a test story from a new member geez no matter what i do, i the admin, can't give access to any user in this system to edit their own story without giving them additional rights to other things, even though the the edit icon appears, all stories are still read only

when i click the edit icon I get

Call to a member function displayElements() on a non-object in /above/root/system/lib-story.php on line 83

I did a manual re-setup of geeklog (versus auto from fantastico) just to be sure I would still get this error under either configuration.