Two Level Commenting Now Available, For Blogger Blogs

Blogger blog owners and viewers have been asking for the ability to post threaded comments, for many years. Today (slightly late for Christmas 2011), Blogger released it's first answer to that request - two level commenting.

Blogger now supports threaded commenting, which means that it is now much easier to differentiate between whether someone is making a general comment on the thread, or responding to another comment on the thread.

This is not what I would call classic "threaded commenting", but it's a reasonable alternative.



If you want to reply to your readers, when they post comments on your blog, that ability is finally here.

You will need a blog with full feeds enabled, and using the embedded comment form. Since private blogs do not publish newsfeeds, this feature will not be available, on private blogs.

As described in the Buzz post, once the comment form and feed are selected, using the New GUI, there's no additional selection needed. Just surf to the blog of your choice, and look under any comment for a new "Reply" button or link.

You'll note that since this feature is provided as part of the embedded comment form, it's built into the standard post template. If your blog, maybe using a custom or third party blog template, lacks threaded commenting, you'll want to refresh the post template, to enable this feature.

Every "Reply" link, whether under an existing or new comment, or under any reply to a comment, when posted, becomes a reply to the original comment. It's quite simple - you have just 2 choices.

• You can post an original comment.
• You can post a reply, to any comment.

And, that's it.

Since two level comments are part of the embedded comment form, you're going to need to check your cookie filters - people using computers with overly restrictive filtering won't be able to use the embedded comment form, and they won't see the two level commenting option. Beyond that issue, two level comments should be simple to use.