Announcing Comment Snob

Comment Snob is an extension for Google Chrome that filters out undesirable comments from comment threads all over the Web.

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You can install it here. It still comes with support for YouTube built in, but you can add support for many other sites by installing Comment Snob rules.

What are Comment Snob Rules?

Comment Snob rules are JSON objects that dictate how Comment Snob finds and filters comments on different websites. Here’s the rule for YouTube that ships with Comment Snob:

{
	"id": "youtube@chrisfinke.com",
	"label": "YouTube",
	"url": "^http://www\\.youtube\\.com/.*$",
	"allCommentsSelector": "#comments-view",
	"commentContainerSelector": "li.comment",
	"commentTextSelector": "div.comment-text",
	"commentHideSelector": "> div",
	"statusElementTag": "div",
	"statusElementAttributes": {
		"class": "content",
		"style": "color: #666;"
	},
	"ajaxInitiatorSelector": ".comments-pagination button, .comments-pagination a, .comments-pagination button > span",
	"updateURL": "http://www.chrisfinke.com/comment-snob/rules/youtube.snob"
}

If you know HTML and understand how to use jQuery, you can write rules for Comment Snob. (Full instructions for writing rules are available here.)

For each rule that you install, you can choose a unique set of filtering rules:

Where Can I Install Rules?

I’ve written eight rules myself and made them available on this page (scroll down to “Featured Comment Snob Rules”); as other people write rules, I’ll link to them from that page as well. Eventually, I’ll have a proper site put together for showcasing the most popular rules.

Where Can I Install It?

Install it from the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery. It’s not available for Firefox yet, but I’ll most likely be releasing the next version for Chrome and Firefox simultaneously.

What’s Next?

This version of Comment Snob is just a shell of what my final vision is for comment filtering on the Web; right now, it’s all very manual, and the chances of false positives are too high for my taste. Adding a proper spellcheck filter will help that somewhat (Chrome doesn’t yet have a spellcheck API like Firefox does), but imagine a future where all comments on all websites could be filtered automatically based on their content, grammar, and keyword frequency, without having to account for personality differences between different websites. (e.g., The expected quality of a YouTube comment is much lower than the expected quality of a Hacker News comment, so Hacker News comments should be judged more stringently.) That starts to get close to what I want Comment Snob to be.

There are also a few small performance upgrades in this version (1.0.2), but I haven’t been able to duplicate the “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error” error some users have been seeing. If you get this error when activating the plugin, e-mail me at cfinke@gmail.com and we can figure it out together.

Download the zip file of the newest version here, and overwrite feed-statistics.php in your blog’s wp-content/plugins/ directory if you downloaded an earlier version. If you’re downloading it for the first time, just copy it to that directory and activate it from the Plugin administration menu.

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I’m self-taught when it comes to JavaScript, as I’ve never taken a formal class that dealt with it, and it was refreshing to find that I’ve managed to pick up most of the good habits that Crockford recommends while avoiding most of the bad habits he cautions against. I must have made good choices as to which sites’ and browser extensions’ source code I studied.

I think next I’ll get started on watching their “Advanced JavaScript” series.

Although in Iraq, unlike on Digg, each person’s vote is equal.