Threaded commenting is a much wanted feature in Blogger. There are 3rd party commenting solutions with threading. Wordpress has threaded commenting built in. But what about threading in native Blogger comments?
When googling Blogger comments hacks, for completely other reasons, I came across this Threaded Comments in Blogger article. However the hack looked a bit complicated, template needed big changes, and I did not want that. And, according to some comments, installation to new templates was not straightforward. I thought, maybe it could be done with fewer changes and code that was easier to maintain. I felt like my mind could not rest before I figured out how to do it. :) So I had to find a solution, and finally I did, here it is. Thanks to Sham for the idea.
This hack works for the (current) layout templates (October 2011). Don't know about classic templates. Does not work with dynamic templates, because they display comments completely differently, getting their data dynamically from comments feed.
How to install Threaded comments
Update January 18th 2012: A newer and easier to install version 2 here, you should consider using it.
You must install my Highlight author comments and Reply to comments hacks first. After installing those, edit template html, and paste this just before </body>:
In the script there are two values, 300 and 20, that you can change to control the maximum indent amount (300 in my code) and the indent of one "step" (20 in my code). Defaults should be quite good. You can also change these values afterwards.
Save template and enjoy. It is almost like magic :)
Code "threads" the comments either by parsing link <a href="#link to comment"... or by parsing @username from message field. A reply containing "@username" is positioned after latest username's comment (which timestamp in earlier than in reply) or for immediate previous comment, if it is from username, on the list before reply.
If you just want to test how the threaded comments work, please don't do it in this post, I will delete totally irrelevant comments. But you can do the testing here: Playground for Blogger threaded comments. Thank you.