How to Use Threaded Comments in WordPress
December 14th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson
Replying to comments on WordPress creates a conversation that can not only keep people coming back, but cause your blog to go viral. Most sites I have seen with comment replies put all those replies in a straight line down the page. Others however, indent the replies to other commenters so you know the reply was meant for them instead of for the post author.
Here is the question that started this topic:
My buddy Ryan uses the neoclassical theme on this blog below. I asked him how he gets his comments to appear in a cascading manner like at this link below and he doesn’t really know. He’s not sure if this is specific to that theme itself or what.
He says, “Regarding comments, I didn’t add any special comment widget. On the “dashboard” (main page), click on “comments” or “discussion” (however it is labeled) toward the bottom of the page. There are some options there that you can adjust. That might help. “
http://sacramentoappraisalblog.com/2009/12/11/what-phone-apps-do-you-use-for-business/
I tried to do this in Thesis 1.6 with no luck.
How the comment replies are formatting may be dictated by your theme style sheet, but to get it started, you need to tell WordPress how many levels deep you want to track replies.
What I mean here is when you reply to a post, that becomes the top level reply. A reply to your comments becomes the second level. A reply to that one becomes the third level and so on.
How much each level of replies is indented depends on your theme style sheet. It may take some fiddling to get it the way you want to fit your site, but you decide how many levels you want to track.
- Log into your WordPress Dashboard.
- Go to Settings, then click on Discussion.
- Look for the line: Enable threaded (nested) comments [X] levels deep
- Enter the desired number of levels deep you want the discussion
to span by entering a number in the box provided and save your settings.
Now when someone replies to another comment, it is “nested” and
indented. The process repeats as many levels as you have chosen
in the settings.
What are your experiences with nested comments in WordPress?
Posted in WordPress | 
Tags: nested comments 
, threaded comments , WordPress design , WordPress settings
8 Responses to “How to Use Threaded Comments in WordPress”
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Jim, I sincerely appreciate your time in answering my question and help us all understand how to setup the “Discussion” setting s in our Wordpress Blogs. Mine isn’t quite setup like Ryan’s blog yet, but I’m working on it. Again, appreciate you so much. Bill Cobb
If you look at how my reply here is indented, you will see that this is done whenever someone responds to a comment. I did nothing special to the style sheet to make this happen. WordPress does this on its own by telling it how many levels deep to track discussions. Once the maximum number of levels is reached, you will see that the Reply link below the last comment is not there. Mine are set for 5 levels deep. All the others above that let you reply, while the fifth level will not. The question remains: How many levels is sufficient to keep a conversation going? The only way to tell is by testing and increasing the number as needed.
I do not see much effect on my sales at the moment. The fact is that, i was not depending on adsense. I positioned my blog to sell something which i manufacture. So, they money coming in from sales.
This article showed you how to display conversations in a cascading format to make them easier to follow. Those people may visit your site. What they do once they are there is up to you.
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