Discarding Comments Under Set Amount Of Words

[Jeffro]

Does anyone know of a plugin that would allow me to automatically discard comments which are under a predetermined amount of words? Getting sick of being notified that a comment is in the spam queue and it's two or three words long. Typically, in this day in age, if your comment is to be taken seriously, it will generally be 5-10 words long. So I would not mind implementing a minimum word limit to get published or at least, get into the queue.

[Cais]

I think there is a great deal of potential in that plugin idea.

I'm also thinking a bit of a theme modification to disable the comment form submit button unless the textarea content is x-characters long would work in the short term.

Maybe one of the Tavern's PHP experts can work out the details?

[itsananderson]

It shouldn't be that hard to do and, hey, my spring break is next week, so maybe I can take a stab.

[andrea_r]

Well, this forum does the same. :D

[Jeffro]

Cool beans Will. As I think about it, trying to determine what is a word and what is not a word probably adds a new level of complexity to the plugin. So instead, I think a way to enable a minimum character limit where the comment has to be above a certain number of characters would work. But, even the distinction between which it should be, words or characters could be debated.

[itsananderson]

I'm thinking that could be something that's specified in the settings. You can either filter comments by number of words, or character length.

In addition, I plan to let you either spam or delete comments.

I might even add support for excluding registered users, and doing what JellyBean suggested, where they can't submit unless they meet your comment requirements.

[Jeffro]

Considering by default, you can already delete and spam comments so why would you need to add that? Also, if someone has a previously approved comment, the restrictions should not be in affect for those people.

My initial goal with a plugin like this is to stop comments like this:

Cool site
I Agree
Awesome blog, I have subscribed to stay updated

From ever getting into my spam queue, I'd rather just have them discarded without thinking twice.

[itsananderson]

Yes, so what I'm saying is that you can choose in the settings to have them automatically deleted, or if you're afraid of accidentally deleting a legitimate comment, you can have them automatically spammed, but not deleted. It'd be your choice.

[Jeffro]

Well that sounds good. Sign me up to your plugin beta test team if you decide to go through with it.

[Jeffro]

Someone mentioned on Twitter about automatically discarding comments which have more than a predetermined amount of misspellings. Again, seems like something like that would add a good bit of unnecessary overhead.