WordPress comments allow you to respond to other people by juxtaposing these comments as hierarchical threads. The problem with moderating comments is that the interface available on the dashboard is not intuitive. Recently one of our subscribers asked us if there was a way to display the parent comment of a comment on the WordPress dashboard?

This is exactly what we will do in this tutorial.

The problem with moderation of comments on WordPress

WordPress allows users to reply to comments by clicking the “Reply” or “Reply” button (depending on the Themes).

how-reply-button

When a user replies to a comment, it (the parent comment) is displayed as a link to the name of the author of the parent comment.

parentcommentlink

While moderating comments, you may want to see the parent comment to better understand the answer.

When you click the parent comment link, it opens a tab and leads you to the parent comment. This small distracting action makes you lose more time than expected.

Well, now you know why moderation of comments can be complicated. Now let's look at how to fix that.

How to display the parent comment of a comment in WordPress

This action will be applied only on the dashboard. All you need to do first is install and activate the " Show Parent Comment“, Available at WordPress.org. This plugin works without configuration.

You just need to go to the comments admin area and you will see each parent of the comments (when it exists), Otherwise the area above the comment will be empty (which means the comment has no parent).

The parent comment is fully displayed, which can in some cases make the comments administration page much longer, if your blog usually receives a lot of comments.

parentcomment

The parent comment is displayed as a quote above the child comment. That's all you need to do. I think a better solution would be to add an option to unfold the parent comment, which will keep the comments admin page a decent length.

I hope this tutorial will be of great use to you. Feel free to share this little tip with your friends on your favorite social networks.