Comment threads don’t work with RankMath SEO activated on website

[Michael Farber]

Hello, I have a website built with Elementor Pro and I’m using RankMath SEO to manage the site’s SEO. I have a blog on my site and I’ve noticed that whenever users comment on articles, the “Reply” button doesn’t work and you cannot reply to other users, only add new comments.

I’ve contacted Elementor Tech support about this issue and several tests confirmed that the comment thread feature doesn’t work when RankMath SEO plugin is active. However, the “Reply” button worked again when we deactivated the plugin.

Would you please be kind to help me figure out this issue? I love using RankMath SEO and I’d like to have discussions on my website, which might help me with SEO.

[moved to Sensitive Data section]

Thank you,
Michael

[Reinelle]

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.

In this case, we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress & FTP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.

Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.

It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/

You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/

We really look forward to helping you.

Thank you.

[Michael Farber]

Hello,

I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?

Thank you.

[Jeremy]

Hello,

Thank you for providing the WordPress admin login and I was able to replicate the issue on our end.

We noticed that you are currently using an older version of Rank Math and your current PHP version is not recommended for our latest update. This may have caused the issue.

Kindly contact your hosting provider, upgrade your PHP version and update our plugin. See if this will resolve the issue.

If not, please share your FTP login in the sensitive data section so we can deeply debug the issue.

Looking forward to helping you.

[Michael Farber]

thank you for the reply.

I don’t think that’s the issue because the problem persisted even before the update was available and RankMath SEO was up to date. I’ve updated the PHP version and RankMathSEO but it didn’t solve the issue.

[Jeremy]

Hello,

I tried reproducing the error again and it seems to have generated a new error as you can see in my screenshot in the sensitive data section.

We would like to further debug the issue but the FTP login you shared isn’t working. We can’t connect to your server. Can you please verify?

Looking forward to helping you.

[Michael Farber]

Hi Jeremy,
I’d need to know the IP you’re trying to connect from, as well as the error message you’re seeing when trying to log in (as requested by my hosting provider).

Thank you.

[Jeremy]

Hello,

Please check the screenshot I shared in the sensitive data section for the error I encountered while attempting to access your FTP.

I also added my current IP address in the sensitive data section.

Please note that our team is distributed around the world and we use dynamic IPs, so even if you whitelist one particular IP now when we get back to the ticket our IP might already have changed so we may never still going to access the FTP.

We are looking forward to helping you.

[Michael Farber]

Hi Jeremy, the hosting provider approved the IP.
Can you try again, please?

[Jeremy]

Hello,

I went ahead and added a filter code to fix this issue.

Please ensure to clear your website cache and try again from your end.

Let us know how that goes. Thank you.

[Michael Farber]

thank you! It works.
Can you please elaborate on the filter you added and where was it placed?
in case I need to reference it in the future.

[Jeremy]

Hello,

That filter will disable the removal of reply_to_com parameter from the URL which by default was enabled by Rank Math.

This is the filter code:

add_filter( 'rank_math/frontend/remove_reply_to_com', '__return_false');

The code has been placed in your theme’s functions.php file.

Hope that helps.

Thank you.