I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has noticed that the discussion threads at YouTube typically contain a low percentage of quality comments. Earlier this week, I remarked to a co-worker that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be able to filter the comments based on the number of spelling mistakes made by the author. Inspired by that thought, I’ve written a Firefox extension that makes that kind of filtering possible.
With the YouTube Comment Snob Firefox extension, you can hide comments that meet any of these criteria:
- More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox’s built-in spell checker.
- All capital letters
- No capital letters
- Doesn’t start with a capital letter
- Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
- Excessive capitalization
For example, here’s part of a typical YouTube comment thread:
And here’s how that same section looks when using YouTube Comment Snob:
(You’ll notice how foreign languages are categorized as spelling mistakes; if you speak a different language and have that dictionary installed for Firefox’s spellchecker, you can choose to have YouTube Comment Snob use that dictionary instead.)
You can install YouTube Comment Snob from its homepage. It is compatible with Firefox 1.5 through 3.0a7, Netscape Navigator 9, and Flock.
Brilliant! Can you develop an add-on that works on Delphi forums? I can assure you there are tons of people who would be interested and forever indebted to you!
I just put a feature request in for this sort of thing. Except it will happen at the time of commenting. Users will see something like,
“Your rude comment has been rejected because it contains the word ‘slut’. Please do not comment if you have nothing nice to say.”
Ideally. But, I know youtube’s solution will be
“Comment rejected.”
thanks for the plugin
YouTube is an incredible site for video lovers.
Thank you. If only it were possible to filter comments on blogs, newspaper websites and other sites. There seems to be a correlation between idiocy and poor writing.