How to add threaded comment feature in your Wordpress blog

If you are getting enough number of comments, than you may have faced problem while answering or replying to them. Though you can reply to them with a comment, the problem is it doesn’t make the comment look interactive or in other words conversation appears broken.

We have already discussed about need of Threaded Comments at my last blog 30 ways to increase your blog comments.

Take a look below how uninteresting are these comments-

User1: I need a Job

User2: Go ask somewhere else :P

User 3:
@User 1 – what are your qualifications?

User1:
@User 2 – Professional S/W developer

This does makes conversation but it doesn’t look ‘interactive’! So the answer to all such problem is having Threaded Comments, you don’t need to add any plugin, nor do you have to add any kind of code to enable threaded comment on your blog. WordPress already provide this feature.

Go to Settings > Discussion in your dashboard, and you’ll discover three new options in the “Other comments settings” section:

“Enable comments [x] levels deep”
“Break comments into pages with [x] comments per page and the [first or last] page displayed by default”
“Comments should be displayed with the [newer or older] comments at the top of each page”

With the threaded comments option, you can connect and interact with your readers while easily keeping track of who’s saying what to whom. You control the conversation by setting the number of levels allowed in your comment threads, from 1 to 10. (Ten levels deep means nine replies under each comment — that’s a lot!)

To save you and your readers from scroll-finger strain, you can now break up comments into pages. You decide where to cut the thread, and whether to display the first or last page of comments as the starting point.

Well WordPress suggests setting threaded comments to about three levels deep, to keep the conversation focused, and I too agree with it, take a look at below picture showing interactive conversation using Threaded comments.

But not all Blog templates allows Threaded Comment (like Arthemia Magazine theme) so in that case you can use WordPress Plugin that will do the job. WP Thread Comment is an enhancement for WordPress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a existing comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.

Have a quick look on its features