How To Enable
Threaded Comments
In WordPress
What Are Threaded Comments?
Threaded comments on a blog are comments where a reply to a particular comment tucks nicely under the comment it is a reply to. This is more easily visualized than verbalized so see the picture!
Some current premium themes already have this setup and working on installation. If your blog already looks like the image above, you do not need to read any further!
WordPress did not originally have threading, so many old themes and old blogs do not have it enabled. (Some old themes do not directly support it, but I have a workaround for that.) You’re probably looking for a solution if your comments and replies look currently look more like this:
Okay! So How Do I Enable Threaded Comments?!
The first section of this reply will likely work for you. WordPress built this feature in a few revisions back, and most high quality themes now simply need the check-box enabled. This will tell you if your theme supports threading without a plugin. If the first part doesn’t solve it for you, just keep reading!
Please do not enable the plugin in step 5 if the dashboard settings in step 2 fix it, or you risk having a major issue!
1. Go into your Dashboard. On the left hand Sidebar, scroll down until you find “Settings“. Expand “Settings” if it is not already and select “Discussion“.
2. In Discussion, under “Other Comment Settings”, the FOURTH check-box says “Enable Threaded Comments“. Check it and then save your changes.
3. Now go to one of your blog posts that has a number of comments. Select one of the early comments and look for the word “[REPLY]” under it. Click it to see if the reply field will open immediately under it. Leave a brief test reply and click send/submit to leave the reply. Once the page refreshes, see if you have the effect you are looking for.
If you do, GREAT, your done. If you don’t, lets move on…
4. Go back to Dashboard -> Sidebar -> Settings -> Discussion and un-check (disable) the box next to “Enable Threaded Comments”. You are going to use a plugin to create this effect and do not want it to have a conflict.
5. Still in your Dashboard -> Sidebar -> Plugins -> Add New … search for: WordPress Thread Comment
6. Install and Activate WordPress Thread Comment and then go to its Settings, which will be under Settings -> WP Thread Comment.
7. This plugin actually runs just fine with the default settings, however I want to mention just a few you may want to alter.
- “Edit Maximum Nest Level“: 3 is fairly low, I suggest 5 if your blog is active
- “Email notify the parent commenter when his post was replied to“: Do NOT enable this if your already running the “subscribe to comments” plugin. Think carefully about your choice on this one, because it may improve commenter follow-up or it may annoy commenters that feel they did not give you permission to email them if they did not specify you could.
- “Front-end Comment Management“: Enable
- Yes there are a lot more options, many of them you probably don’t want/need to alter.
8. Repeat Step #3 from above and you should now have SUCCESS!
One Note About Threaded Replying From The Dashboard
This isn’t really a “step” but I wanted to note that once threading is working, you can also do replies in the Dashboard -> Comments section, to individual comments, and they will generally appear threaded correctly on the blog. This is handy for bloggers like myself that prefer to do majority of their replies from the dashboard. No special steps needed to make this work!
Summary & Thoughts
Comment threading is pretty much essential today since it encourages reader interaction. It helps make your content “sticky” in the sense that you can start dialogs that readers may come back to repeatedly. The ability to have these inline comments is also a lot easier on the eyes and visually shows your NEW visitors that you as an author are interacting with your existing visitors. All of these things add up to the relationship building that is so critical for success today!
Hopefully you found this post helpful in enabling threaded comments in wordpress! It really is rather simple for most of the new themes! Questions, comments or feedback? Leave them below! I look forward to hearing your thoughts and I’m happy to answer any questions. If you know of anyone that may find this information useful, I would be grateful if you would syndicate, share or otherwise pass it along! Make it a great day!
Kimberly
{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }
Great in depth info Kim! You do a great job explaining the detail to get people going because everyone should have threaded comments on their blog. It promotes on site discussion and can drastically increase SEO results.
If anyone is using an Empowered Blog, threaded comments are already built in and there is no need to download the plugin.
Clifton Hatfield´s last blog ..New for Wordpress 3.0 – Menu Management
Thanks Clifton! Indeed, the improvement in both relationship building and Google’s opinion of the site as “active and relevant” a definitely reasons to get this set up in places its not.
Fortunately more and more themes have this set up and working by default today. In fact, off the top of my head, I don’t know of any paid premium theme that does not have this working correctly at the moment. The real issue is when someone just getting started does so with a free theme. So many of the free themes are lacking a lot of basic features for completeness. Fortunately there’s now a wide range of high quality, easy to use themes on the market and people can find one that suits their needs best.
Kimberly
I notice quite a few blogs that can use this information
and I thank you for all of your wonderful fixes!
I really do get drawn into the comments threaded on some posts.
The ones like you mentioned when others comment on a thread of other
commentators replies get very interesting and often you run across value
added other than what the original post provided. Some go on for over a
years worth of updated comments. It is a smart move for sure.
Robin Lynn Brooks´s last blog ..Listen for that Real Connection in Relationship Building
I agree! It’s a lot of fun to start interacting with communities that form around various blogs. That really is our goal, what we could be aiming for… to build that sort of community!
Hopefully this will help some of the guys struggling with their themes get them going. This mostly affects the free themes, and those are usually the themes that people pick up because finances are tight and they’re trying to cut corners and save every bit they can. Usually those folks need every answer they can find! I hope this helps them out!
Thanks hun!
Kimberly
Kimberly Castleberry´s last blog ..How To Enable Threaded Comments In Wordpress
I really need to start a wordpress blog. There seems to be an unlimited amount of features and configurations! There will surely be even more features added in the future.
Vince@wrestling moves´s last blog ..Elm Creek Quilts Series
huh.. I had no idea that WP built-in comment threading. I always like to see threading in comments, makes things so much more understandable. I’ll go through my WP sites and enable it
Thanks Kim!
Josiah@Tumblr Layouts´s last blog ..Tumbl News
Hey welcome back Josiah! Yeah, I’m really not sure when they wiggled that feature in without some of us seeing it, but it sure is nice! Not sure if you saw I took the blog fully DoFollow a few days ago, so now your commentluv links are all dofollow as well. Have a good one!
Kimberly
Hi Kimberly,
Great in-depth explanation and instructions! I love threaded comments. It makes it so much easier to reply.
Thanks for sharing this!
Have a great week!
Ilka
Ilka Flood´s last blog ..Are You Struggling Because You Don’t Know Your Numbers? | MLM Tips for Beginners
Aloha dear Kimberly,
I love the threaded comments. It really helps so much for interaction! Thank you so much for this detailed description of how to get the plugin.
You give such valuable content Kimberly and you make it very easy for anyone to follow step-by-step!
Thank you for being such a “light” in this technical world that may seem “dark” for some of us!
Much love & aloha,
Kellie
Kellie Hosaka@home based business´s last blog ..What Is “Spiritual Awakening” & How Does It Relate To My Business? – pt. 2
Great post Kim! I’ve done the change on my settings and seeing the indent. Will put in the plugin as well.
I am looking forward to interacting more with my commenters.
Thank you! You saved me at least an hour. =)
To Your Genius,
Eiji
Eiji Morishita´s last blog ..Avoid Burnout Easily
Thanks again! Just the one change in settings worked and didn’t need the plugin.
I used another plugin to do it in the past and it messed up the formatting so I gave up on it. Thanks Kim for making my life simpler.
To Your Genius,
Eiji
Eiji Morishita´s last blog ..Avoid Burnout Easily
Yay! Glad it worked for you Eiji! You’re blog is looking great, I’ll stop by soon!
Yay! Thank you so much Kimberly. I’d been struggling with trying to figure out this for some time. It is now working perfectly (i think!) on my blog.
Your directions were suburb.
Very grateful
Sally
Yay! Glad it worked for you. Its such a simple little tidbit that I’m not sure why its not enabled by default since majority of themes now support it. (Surprisingly some woothemes still need the plugin. Surprising since they’re a great theme shop.)
Hey Kim
This is a big deal I find. I found this out a few months ago and I love the feel that it give the blog. Now it actually looks like there are conversations on a blog, not just a bunch of comments.
Thanks so much for adding this, I feel more people need to be doing this.
Steve
Steve@Start A Online Business´s last blog ..Understanding The Keys To Starting An Online Business
Thanks Kim, i just updated on my blog. I thought nested comments were when you did not make the comment public until you were ready to approve and reply. You learn something everyday in this game
Cheers,
Matt
Hey Kim,
thanks for another handy techie tip. I love how you’re always on the leading edge of the latest and greatest in how to’s on blogging. You do exceptionally well to stay up with it all. Thanks for sharing.
Cheers
Toni
Toni King’s last blog post: http://tonisuggests.com/our-fellow-sea-beings/
Thanks Kimberly!
It’s fun learning from you! Thank you for all your teaching!
This was the FIRST thing you taught me back-in-the-day! What was that 6 months ago?
~Linda
Kim awesome! I have been looking how to take care of this problem. This is a great post you don’t have one solution but 2 awesome thank you.
Steve Shoemaker
Glad you got it working on your blog! It would make sense if new installations would have that enabled by default but they cant do that because if they’d upgrade an old blog that was using a plugin or custom-coded solution they could break things for some people. Hopefully they work on this a little further to point out to people how easy it is to enable it. It’s not that we don’t want it – its just kinda a hidden gem!
Hi Kimberly!
I have one of those ancient themes that doesn’t support threading. When I asked @DonnaFontenot about suitable plugins, show pointed me to your tutorial.
Thanks for the detailed help! The plugin works nicely.
You mentioned that we had to be careful about our choices for notifying commentators. Do you have a tutorial for “Subscribe to Comments?”
Cheers,
Mitch
The plugin “Subscribe to comments” is actually well behaved and CAN-SPAM compliant by itself. However, there are a lot of related plugins that are not.
Here is a link to a post I did on “Comment Reply Notification” that has a pretty extensive section on CAN-SPAM compliance for wordpress plugins.
http://just-ask-kim.com/wordpress-plugin-review-comment-reply-notification/
Glad you got it working Mitch and thanks for stopping by!
Kimberly
Thanks again Kimberly. You have helped me yet again.You have so much knowledge about all this technical stuff and I am so happy we are friends.
Hi Kimberely
I found your blog when i was looking for the comment reply notification plug in and from that post was lead here.
Now my WP is currently 3.0.1 and when i uploaded the comment reply notification plug in it didnt work and I have no idea why.
I use the threaded comment which is supported by WP and i wanted to disable it and simply upload this plug in which will also supports the comment reply notification but you dont advise it …so what should i do?
Hey hun! Thanks for stopping by Mayya.
The comment reply notification is only one piece of what is built into wp-thread-comment. I think you may be looking at it the other way around. CRN is part of Thread-Comment, but Thread-Comment is not part of CRN.
If your theme already supports the default comment threading check box – and you use this plugin you may have conflicts because those two parts do the same thing. That would be similar to using wp-comment-thread with the CRN plugin too – because they do the same thing, they will confuse each other.
If your theme supports the default wordpress threading, you want to use the CRN plugin. However you may need to read the comments on that plugins post because there is a bit of a bug with it. It does not work from the dashboard only from the front of the blog. I’m taking donations to get someone to fix it soon!
Kimberly
Great information–thank you for the help!
Am trying it to use Threaded Comments at my site nomad4ever.com. Problem am facing with WP built-in or the above mentioned Plugin is, that the ‘Reply’ link appears, but nothing happens, once you click on it.
Tried all possible combinations of enable/disable in plugin management, but new comments won’t appear where they should. Firefox/Chrome simply don’t output any error message, when clicking on ‘reply’, while IE says ‘Error on page’ in the status bar and does nothing.
What’s wrong with my setup? Can anyone please help? Thanks a million!
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