The default configuration for a WordPress-powered blog is to have the reader comments displayed in chronological order. That’s how they appear here on the BlueFur blog and that’s how they appear on Beyond the Rhetoric, among the countless other blogs out there that accept user comments on the posts. In doing this, the oldest comments show up on top and the newest comments show up at the bottom.

This sounds like it would be the most logical way to display comments, but some of you may want to go the other way. By having the comments displayed in reverse chronological order (newest on top), you can effectively eliminate the possibility of having users post a “first!” comment purely for the reason of always showing up at the top of the comment list for that post. This can be a problem for more popular blogs.

Thankfully, reversing the order of the comments on your blog is actually a very easy process and it only involves altering a single line of code in your WordPress theme. If you go into the comments.php file for your theme, you’ll find a specific snippet of code that looks like this:

foreach ($comments as $comment)

Add in an extra line of code above it that reads as follows:

$comments = array_reverse($comments);

And that’s all you need to do! Most WordPress themes will have that first line in their comments.php file, but there may be some that don’t. Naturally, this modification will not work for those themes.