Blogger’s Threaded Comments

Thursday, April 5

At some point this year, Blogger pushed out the threaded comments feature that allows the blog owner, or other commenters, to respond to a comment left on the blog by clicking a Reply link displayed immediately below the comment.  Readers/commenters can even reply to a reply and get a regular blogging conversation going!

I realize few readers return to a post to look at comments again.  So how useful is this feature really?  Where I think it will come in handy is if a commenter leaves a question, but s/he has not turned on the email reply feature and I can’t respond directly.  Or, even if s/he has email reply turned on, I might wish to also post the answer in the comments section for the benefit of other readers.

Not shown above is the delete link Blog owners will see next to the reply link.
Commenters will only see the delete link for their own comments.

Turning on threaded comments is supposedly easy.  Just set blog feed to full (simpler than messing with individual feed settings) and use embedded comments instead of the full page or pop-up window.  In reality, if you’ve customized the basic template you may have to take some additional steps — such as resetting your widget templates to default.  That’s a good solution if your customizations are minimal.  I did this with our Two to Travel’s Viewfinder blog and it worked as expected.

For my two primary blogs, however, I didn’t want to do any resetting of widgets and risk losing my customizations.  So I looked for and found some html code suggestions.  I applied those to Two to Travel and Phaeton Journeys, and voilà — threaded comments.

HTML — four small letters, but they can be scary.  And they should be.  A lot of damage can be done if you don’t use html coding correctly.  Am I an html guru?  No.  Do I use html?  Yes.  I know some very basic stuff to manipulate my posts, but for complicated changes, I use code written by someone who knows what they’re doing.  And I take precautions.  I ALWAYS — repeat, ALWAYS — back up my template before adding or removing any html code.  I’ve yet to mess up and have to revert to my saved template copy — KNOCK ON WOOD!!!!

If you want to see if you can easily convert to threaded comments, here are the SIMPLE STEPS.  Proceed at your own risk :-)

These steps are based on the new dashboard interface.  If you are still using the old interface, you can temporarily switch to the new one by clicking the Try the Updated Blogger Interface link in the top right corner (see screenshot below).  By the way, Blogger is going to switch everyone to the new dashboard sometime in April, so you might as well make the switch now and get familiar with the lay of the land, so to speak.

• To set your per-post comments feed to full (for most, this is probably already set to full):

Note: If you prefer, you can use the custom option from the drop-down to tweak blog post and comment feeds individually, but it’s easiest to just set it all to full from the drop-down.

• To set your comments location to embedded:

Note: When I switched to embedded comments, Blogger defaulted word verification to Yes; you’ll want to change that to No if you don’t use word verification.

As noted above, these steps are supposed to work if you have not customized your template.  (For existing post comments, you might have to refresh your screen before the Reply link becomes visible.)  If it, didn’t work and you want to go back to the way things were, just reverse the steps above, and choose something other than embedded for your comment location.

If you don’t see the Reply link after following these simple steps, and want to pursue it further, you can read up on suggestions that I found in this blog.  (There are a lot of other blogs/forums out there with thoughts and suggestions.)  It was from this blog that I got the idea to revert my widget templates, and that did the trick.  Again, I did that on a template on which I had made relatively few customizations and I didn’t care if I lost them.

If you have a heavily customized template, and the simple steps above don’t cut it for you, here’s one of the many solutions I found when I searched for how to enable threaded comments.  Scroll down to the Tweaks to Get the Threaded Comments section for the html code I used in the template for this blog and the steps I followed.

Whatever you do – remember to BACK-UP YOUR TEMPLATE before you ever make any html changes or you default your widget templates.  And, it goes without saying — know where on your computer the template is saved to so you can find the file if you need to revert to it.