Frequently Asked Questions:

FAQ: My comments don’t seem to be working, people can’t leave comments

I get lots of emails that basically say this:  my comments aren’t working, people can’t leave comments unless they visit the single-page permalink for the post.  If you’re having this problem, your comment area probably looks like this:

You can see how many comments there are, but there are no links to add a comment or show comments, just a lonely pipe line-thingy floating out in the breeze.

Fixing this is super simple.  It is caused by skipping a step in the installation.  This is what happens when you forget to activate and tweak the Ajaxed-Wordpress plugin which allows for the inline comments on the main pages.

To fix it, go back to this section of the tutorials, watch the video and carefully follow the instructions and your comments will work just fine.

Questions? Instead of emailing for support, leave a comment below so everyone can benefit from any clarification.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 and is filed under Comments, Frequently Asked Questions. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

30 Responses to “FAQ: My comments don’t seem to be working, people can’t leave comments”

  1. On April 25th, 2008 at 3:18 pm Jared said:

    Note: I’ve gotten a few emails from people who have read this post and are still having trouble with their comments. Almost every time it is someone who has turned on the option of having their comments on by default, and has not properly edited the code in their index.php file. If that sounds like you, revisit this post, and TRIPLE-CHECK that you edited the code correctly. In fact, just copy the three lines from that post and paste them over the original four lines of code.

  2. On April 25th, 2008 at 7:20 pm Pam Campbell said:

    This used to work> Don’t know what I changed to cause this. The show coments, hide coments link shows up but there isn’t a link to add comments. Don’t know what’s up. I tired the tweaking-it had been done. Any ideas?

  3. On April 25th, 2008 at 7:43 pm Pam Campbell said:

    I gave up. Now I don’t care if the comments don’t show. I just want the add comment link back. Can you look?
    http://www.atreddoor.com/blog

  4. On April 25th, 2008 at 9:26 pm Jared said:

    Pam Campbell » what does the AWP section of your index.php file look like now? can you copy the code into a comment?

  5. On April 29th, 2008 at 12:48 pm Greta said:

    I’m having the same problem still. I have quadruple checked, promise. I did what the tutorial said to allow inline comments, and also to have a leave comments link under each post, but still, nothing for either. Help!
    P.S. Don’t know why this should matter, but just in case… In my plug-ins under Presentation>AWP Management, I have 3 things activated: Inline Comment Form, Inline Comments, and Inline Posts… sounds like these are all things I would want activated, but also sound a little redundant, so I don’t know if that’s messing me up?

  6. On April 29th, 2008 at 7:50 pm Jared said:

    Greta » whoops, my fault. the code was messed up on the post about having comments displayed by default. i fixed it.

  7. On May 2nd, 2008 at 3:23 pm pam campbell said:

    Looks like this…still isn’t allowing you to leave a comment.

    comments        

  8. On May 2nd, 2008 at 6:14 pm Jared said:

    pam campbell » i think they are working. i just left you a comment. did you get it figured out?

  9. On May 2nd, 2008 at 6:18 pm Pam Campbell said:

    I did!!! Thanks!!! Still have some tweaking to do. Actually upgraded my WP version today with your instructions and it went flawlessly!! Thanks again. Love the template and all of your tutorials!

  10. On May 3rd, 2008 at 4:22 pm Petra Hall said:

    I updated the plugin (AWP) and the WP 2.5.1 today and the comments ended up like the screenshot above. It was working before these upgrades. So I did follow the instructions in your video - but now they redone the layout a bit on this plugin (in the AWP Management), so I had to mess around a bit to find the right places - still under the same tabs, but wasn’t working well. But I got it fixed - not sure what I did as it wasn’t working after a few refresh.

    OH, and I still can’t find the one spot to translate the words “no comments” by the line with the author name, category, tags and edit links at the end of the posts - there’s somewhere I need to fix that translation, but I can’t find it in the template nor the plugin. Do you have any ideas?

  11. On May 3rd, 2008 at 4:38 pm Petra Hall said:

    Oh, never mind, I found it! I had to change it in the Main Index Template. All fixed! :)

  12. On May 8th, 2008 at 11:48 am Kristin said:

    Hi Jared,
    I’m having some problems with my comment forms, in the fact that people can’t add comments at all.

    When trying to add a comment a saying comes up that I’m missing something in the directory, but i’ve double and triple checked and i don’t think I am.

    Any help you could give would be really appreciated!

    Thanks,
    Kristin

  13. On May 8th, 2008 at 12:46 pm Jared said:

    Kristin » it looks like there is a missing file. If I were you the first thing I would do is delete the Ajaxed-WordPress plugin completely from your server and reupload it again from your download folder. Then see if it works.

  14. On May 8th, 2008 at 2:16 pm Kristin said:

    Thanks Jared, I think I’ve got it all figured out. Reloading everything seemed to work :)

  15. On May 9th, 2008 at 2:17 pm Jared said:

    Good. I’ve found that if you get funky errors from Ajaxed-WordPress, the first thing to try is deleting the plugin completely off your server and reuploading it. That often does the trick.

  16. On May 12th, 2008 at 11:26 am Lindsey Marie said:

    hey!
    I have a question! how come people can’t leave comments in posts that are archived? has this already been addressed? They can leave comments in the main posts so that’s all good! Any help would be appreeciated! Thanks SOOOO MUCH!!!

  17. On May 12th, 2008 at 7:51 pm Jared said:

    Lindsey Marie » you can leave comments on any post. You just can’t leave comments from within the archive page (or category page, for that matter). you can leave comments from a main page, or from a single post page. On the archive page (which is kind of like a list of posts from that month or whatever) you can click on the post titles and get to single, permalink pages, where people can leave comments.

  18. On May 14th, 2008 at 6:13 am --christine said:

    http://christinegacharna.com/blog/?p=871

    My comments are working great on the main page, but when I click on an individual post, they’re no longer separated from one another (example above). I have searched through the FAQs but I can’t find the easy fix for this. ??? thank you!

  19. On May 14th, 2008 at 7:26 am Jared said:

    –christine » something looks funky there for sure. did you fiddle with the code of the “single.php” file at all? because it looks like there was an attempt made to add code for Ajaxd-WP inline comments to the single page template.

  20. On May 14th, 2008 at 1:01 pm --christine said:

    no; I haven’t touched that page, I’m nowhere near qualified. would it work for me to paste the contents of “single.php” from my original ProPhoto download into the one that’s on my blog now?

  21. On May 14th, 2008 at 1:28 pm Jared said:

    –christine » yeah, try that. if it doesn’t work, shoot me an email and I’ll fix it for you.

  22. On June 1st, 2008 at 7:23 pm Phil said:

    Hey Jared, absolutely love the theme…was trying to get the comments working, but here’s the problem I’m running into:

    I wasn’t getting the option to add a comment at all, so I enabled the “AJAX Comment Form”, but now if I click on “add comment” it opens up the post in a new page as opposed to using the inline comments.

    I made sure everything was as according to the instructions and I tried deleting and re-uploading the aWP plugin as well without any luck…

  23. On June 2nd, 2008 at 10:02 am Jared said:

    @Phil: do you have any other plugins activated that deal with comments? like a recaptcha or something like that? try deactivating all your other non-prophoto plugins and then test. if it works, then activate them one by one and test to see which one is giving you the problem.

  24. On June 2nd, 2008 at 10:46 am Phil said:

    Hey Jared -

    I’ve only got three other plugins running: Flashfader (1.1.1), Google Analycator (2.12), and Google XML Sitemaps (3.1.0.1). I tried disabling them all, no luck with all three disabled. I tried testing after re-activating each one and no luck there either.

  25. On June 2nd, 2008 at 11:38 am Jared said:

    @Phil: i sent you an email.

  26. On June 8th, 2008 at 8:01 pm Gabriel said:

    Hi Jared,

    I did everything and I still can’t get “add comments” to appear in my blog. After I upgraded to AJAXed 1.19.2, it didn’t show it anymore. Please help.

  27. On June 9th, 2008 at 7:24 am Jared said:

    @Gabriel: was it working before you upgraded Ajaxed-WP? by the way (Aaron would be mad at me for saying this) but I don’t recommend that people upgrade — there are no new features needed in 1.19.2, and configuration gets a little trickier.

    so, to get it to work now, I think you have to go to “Design” => “AWP Managment” => “Comment Form” and select “enable Ajax comment form”, then save.

  28. On June 9th, 2008 at 10:11 am Gabriel said:

    Hi Jared,

    Yes, it worked well before I upgraded. After I upgrade to the new AJAXed, it was gone. Thanks for your help, I managed to get it work after I select “enable Ajax comment form”.

  29. On July 2nd, 2008 at 12:03 am aviva said:

    Jared - I’ve quadruple checked. The comment bar says “1 comment” but it isn’t a link where you can see the comment. The only way to see the existing comment is to click on “add a comment”. I want people to be able to view the comments without having them automatically listed.
    Help? and THANKS!
    Aviva

  30. On July 2nd, 2008 at 6:39 am Jared said:

    @aviva: that’s odd. i’m going to send you an email and i’ll get this figured out for you.

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