Sometimes someone will accidentally reply to a comment on a WordPress post instead of starting their own comment thread. This can create a set of replies that aren’t actually relevant to the original comment. They’re hard to follow and are ugly, the replies that are relevant to the original comment are hidden by the additional conversation. There’s no way to fix this through the WordPress Admin interface, but you can using phpMyAdmin. You can also use this to change what comment a comment is replying to.
- Backup your database first.
- Open up phpMyAdmin through cPanel.
- Click on the database WordPress uses.
- Click on search.
- Search for the comment that shouldn’t be a reply (the comment that you want to outdent) inside the comments table, search for something semi-unique to the comment eg. the IP address of the commenter.
- Click browse.
- Click the pencil icon beside the comment.
- Change the parent_comment value to 0.
