My comments section disappeared — please help!

Hi Art Bella, can we have a link to that post please so that we can take a look?

Similar issue happened with me as well.
The comment form is still there however comments that have been made aren’t shown. For example, comments were recently made for these 2 posts: https://wayfaringwybles.com/thistle/
https://wayfaringwybles.com/jewelweed/
but these aren’t displayed in the comments section.

Hmm, that is odd. I just tested the latest version of Sela – 1.0.8 – with the latest version of WordPress – 4.3 – and previous comments are still displayed, in addition to the form on my test site.

Here are some troubleshooting steps:

1) Have you made any theme changes in your child-theme files? If so, try undoing them temporarily.

2) Does the issue persist if you activate the Sela parent theme?

3) Did you activate or update any new plugins recently? You could try temporarily deactivating all your plugins. If the problem is gone, reactivate your plugins one-by-one, testing the Subscribe button in between each, to find the conflict.

1. The only theme change I made recently was to remove the default image link per this tutorial: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/automatically-remove-default-image-links-wordpress/. I undid that change but the problem remained. I also have a comments.php file to remove the text: ” you may use these html tags…” per info from this thread. I undid that change but the problem still persisted.

2. Activating the Sela parent theme worked. The comments re-appeared again!

3. I reactivated my child theme then deactivated each of my plugins one-by-one as you suggested but the problem keeps happening again.

I don’t want to have to use the parent theme. What can I do?

Thanks for reporting back on those troubleshooting steps – very helpful.

Something in your child theme is likely interfering. What files do you have in the child theme? Try removing them one-by-one – testing in between each – to see when the issue goes away.

If that doesn’t help you narrow the culprit, could you upload your child theme zip somewhere so I can download it and have a look?

Problem solved!

I tried removing files on-by-one but the problem continued. Then decided instead to remove all the files in the child theme and added them one-by-one. Surprisingly, this worked. The problem was the comments.php file so I deleted that file altogether. For some reason I no longer need the file to remove the text: ” you may use these html tags…” It doesn’t appear anymore, even without the file. But my comments are back!

Thank you for your assistance.

I figured it out after my host couldn’t help me. Apparently “allow comments” in the quick edit section got deselected. Had no idea that option was even there. Thank you all for the help and tips!

I’m glad you’re both set!

If anyone else needs a hand with something in Sela, please start a fresh thread so we can troubleshoot with you one-on-one. Thanks!