Updating and extending
"Featured Comments" by Pippin Williamson and Utkarsh Kukreti, Extraordinary Comments enables a site operator to highlight particular comments where they appear in threads, and also display them together in a widget and dedicated archive. Comments can be set "featured" either where they appear in comment threads - via a menu visible only to users at Editor level and above - or from "Comments" in WordPress Admin via the "on-hover"/Quick Edit menu. An option to "bury" comments in the same way is also available on the same menus.
Comments featured or buried in Featured Comments will still be featured or buried in Extraordinary Comments, and prior "in-thread" styles should still apply. Extraordinary Comments also corrects a defect in Featured Comments that prevented its front end option from working as intended.
As ever, facility with CSS and PHP will help you get the most out of a plug-in like this one, though Extraordinary Comments has been designed with the idea of working with standard themes "out of the box."
EXTRAORDINARY COMMENTS IS INTENDED FOR STANDARD WORDPRESS COMMENT THREADS
This plug-in will not work with 3rd Party commenting systems like Disqus or Facebook Comments, and either may not function or may require specialized adjustments to work with custom commenting set-ups or plug-ins.