One thing I find quite handy on my blog is comment numbering.

I had it for a little while ages ago, and people liked to be able to say they were responding to Comment Number Whatever.

Alas, whatever mechanism I had been using stopped working.

If you Google for it, you’ll find any number of hints and tips pages from about 2013 which refer you to Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering plug-in… which is no longer maintained, and no longer works with new versions of WordPress.

Thankfully I found a way that works – and it’s actually simpler.

The new ability to add custom CSS into Themes means you can add this:

li.depth-1 {
    list-style-type: decimal;
}

There are further tweaks you can do if you’re using threaded comments, but the above works for me.

One catch: On some templates, a comment by the blog author is highlighted. This may suppress the numbering for that comment (so it misses out). It’s doing that on my personal blog template, but not here on geekrant. I’ll look for a fix for that.