Threaded Comments? What?
Let me start again… Chances are that you are blogging now, you want to be blogging, or you are interested in blogging – otherwise, why would you be here now? When your readers come to your site and want to participate in the conversation, they leave their thoughts via Comments. Comments are typically left on Blog Posts, but you can also have them on pages as well.
So let me ask you this – Are you using the Threaded comment feature that WordPress offers? As of right now, the current version of WordPress is 3.2.1. Even if you go back as far as 2.7, this feature has been available. So, if you HAVE been blogging prior to that, you may not be aware that this feature is out there!
Threaded comments allow the conversation (or thread) to remain intact. You can see someone make a comment and if anyone replies to that comment, it will appear indented underneath the original comment. For example, this is a threaded comment from Another Post About Backing Up:
But even though under Settings > Discussion you see the ability to activate threaded comments and indicate how many levels deep you want it to be, you have to actually make some changes to your theme for threaded comments to work.
To set your comments to be threaded and more easy to follow, in your dashboard, go to Settings, and then Discussion. Check the option, ‘Enable threaded (nested) comments’:
One word of warning – your theme needs to support threaded comments. If it doesn’t, then this WordPress setting will be overridden and you will not see them. Not to worry! You have some other options – you can always use a Threaded Comment Plugin! Search for ‘Threaded Comment’ in the Add New Plugin area.
Enjoy!
Thanks for the post.
I had this setting- and never see the threaded comments. I guess that means I have to change my theme. (Which is a heck of a lot better than changing my tune….)
For some reason, I am thinking of the corny joke – You can tune a piano, but you can’t tune a fish… Not sure why 😉
Thanks, Roy!
Thanks, Paul. I didn’t know about the theme limitations or extra setting to check. I also didn’t know the WP backup does not catch everything. Yikes! Thank you! I find your info to be consistently helpful.
Glad I can help Ali! Let me know if there is ever something that I can address here for you! We aim to please (well, we try to at least!)
thanks for this info. I did a search for threaded comments and it comes up with 2 choices
Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering or WordPress Thread Comment. they both have the same rating. which one are you using?
Hi Nancy – I am using the Thesis theme here at I Need Help With WordPress – this theme supports the WordPress Threaded comments functionality. I used a plugin in the past on another site – let me go look that up and I will post it later. Thanks.