Alternative text for "0 Comment"

Hi,
I currently have an issue with an alternative text for “0 Comments” in the grid layout.
When there are no comments yet, I want to engage the user to post, so it would show “Contribute” instead of “0 Comment”.

The great DUDE gave me some code to edit on config-templatebuilder/avia-shortcodes/postslider.php a month ago on this support post:
From what I recall it worked great, but I just updated the theme, changed the code on postslider.php with the code I previously used, but it doesn’t work anymore.
It shows “0 Contribute” instead of just “Contribute”.

Is there a way to correct this?
My code is the following, near line 323 of config-templatebuilder/avia-shortcodes/postslider.php:

if($show_meta && !empty($excerpt))
{
$output .= "<div class='slide-meta'>";
if ( $commentCount != "0" || comments_open($the_id) && $entry->post_type != 'portfolio')
{
$link_add = $commentCount === "0" ? "#respond" : "#comments";
if($commentCount == "0")
{
$text_add = __('Contribute', 'avia_framework' );
}
else
{
$text_add = $commentCount === "1" ? __('Comment', 'avia_framework' ) : __('Comments', 'avia_framework' );
}

$output .= "<div class='slide-meta-comments'><a href='{$link}{$link_add}'>{$commentCount} {$text_add}</a></div><div class='slide-meta-del'> | </div>";
}
$output .= "<div class='slide-meta-time'>" .get_the_time(get_option('date_format'), $the_id)."</div>";
$author_id = $entry->post_author;
$author_url = get_site_url()."/author/".get_the_author_link();
$author_name = get_the_author_meta( 'display_name' , $author_id );

$output .= ' | by <a href="'.$author_url.'">'.$author_name.'</a>';
$output .= "</div>";
}

2) I also noticed that the author url doesn’t work.
Instead of going to domain.com/author/name-surname, it goes to domain.com/author/Name%20Surname, which doesn’t exist so shows an error 404.

Thanks for your help!