I liked this plugin so much I just had to fix it and use it!
Brian’s Threaded Comments is such a powerful tool to be used on a bloggers site. It really encourages interaction between yourself and all of your Commentators as well. In fact, on Saman’s site I was able to get into a great Haiku/Zen fight with Natron that was easily readable thanks to this plugin. I have seen the successes of it many times over on many blogs including the great Saman Sadeghi and the great John Chow.

So what on earth is my problem with this plugin? Well its really very simple, I’m a “tabber”. When I fill out a web form, I use my tab button to tab from one field to the next. I fill out my name, press tab, fill out my email, press tab, etc…. Well the problem with Brian’s Threaded Comments is once you hit tab after the Comment box, you are sent to the top of the page rather than being sent to the Add Comment Button.

Example:

The Problem:
Is actually very simple. When putting the code and output together, Brian assigned a tabindex to the four text input fields, but not the button. So your browser being the good little trooper it is follows in the tab order given, then resets back to its default for the remaining items. Your page itself is typically the first tab, when you override that, it waits its turn and than takes the soonest opportunity. Thus, that is why right now when you tab from comments hoping to be sent to the button, you get sent to the top of the page.

The Solution:
Or should I call it “a solution”. There are many ways to fix this, but perhaps the easiest way is to just assign a tabindex to the button. What you want to do is find the following line in your custom comments.php code:

<input onclick="if(typeof(onAddComment) == 'function') { onAddComment(); } else { alert('ERROR:
It looks like the website administrator hasn\'t activated the Brians Threaded Comments plugin from the plugin page'); };" name="addcommentbutton" type="button" id="addcommentbutton" value="Add comment" tabindex="5" />

Due to limited space, the above wrapped, but this will be just one line in the code (unless your coded editor wraps text). The location of it will most likely be different for everyone as we have all added custom code for avatars and such, but for me, this was at line 203. So my guess is it is in that general neighborhood for you too. As you can see by the code example above, I just added tabindex="5" at the very end. That fixed the tab order issue and now all the “tabbers” like me will love posting on your site again!

*Update - Turns out I was not the only one who was annoyed by this error. Ryan J Parker had also written a post about it too, it can be found here: Fixing the Tab Index with Brian’s Threaded Comments

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