Blog Azeroth

I'm hoping that someone here will be able to help me. Currently I'm using the Vigilance theme for my blog, and really love the way it looks... except for one problem: nested comments. I want nested comments because I think it's easier to follow a conversation that way. However, Vigilance is making every comment in a thread narrower and narrower until later comments look ridiculous. I can't find any options in the settings to change the way nested comments work. Does anyone know a fix for this, or am I stuck?

The blog is here, if you to take a look: http://blogofthetreant.wordpress.com/

The only way to fix this problem (and keep your theme--and free at that!) is to limit the number of nested comments.

From your Wordpress Menu, go to the heading Settings. Choose Discussion.

The second section "Other Comment Settings" has a tick box for enabling threaded (nested) comments. Next to that line is a drop-down menu with numbers. By default, I believe this is set to 10. You may want to change it to 2-3 to avoid the issue you're having.

Ok, thanks. I was hoping I wouldn't have to limit the number of levels so drastically, but someone on Wordpress told me that I'd need to buy some CSS upgrade to change it otherwise. My concern now is that I might lose some of the comments already on my blog if I change the number of nested levels... Do you know if they'd be deleted or become invisible if I make the change?

That I don't know. I would assume not, but it wouldn't hurt to export the database to cover your bases.

It looks like the comments might nest better if you could just reduce the indent... have you tried mucking about with the code in comments.php?

I'm using Mystique as my theme and while I don't get a lot of comments, when I was testing how they looked they worked okay. Not sure if you need a plug-in or to just borrow a bit of that theme's code?

Nah, I tested it with my blog and it only affects new comments.



The shitty thing about Wordpress is that if you want a free account, you can't modify the theme layouts at all. You can choose how deep nested comments will go, but the indent is beyond what you can do. You'll need to upgrade your account for that.

That sucks, I didn't know the Wordpress.com accounts were that restricted. Half the fun of picking a theme is hacking things so they look just right.

Yeah, you need to upgrade to be able to do that. If you have access to the .css file of the theme (it can be found at the bottom of the .php files), you can control the width of the nested comments so that it isn't continually shrinking. I like to use two or three levels, and restrict the widths for each level (full for original comment, 80% for replies and maybe 70-75% for the third level where people reply to replies. Then, after that, if people want to reply, they have to reply to the second or third level, or reply to the original comment.

It keeps things tidier and more organized imo. Good Luck!