YouTube Comment Snob is an extension for the Firefox Web browser that allows you to filter YouTube comments based on spelling, capitalization, and punctuation usage.

I've updated YouTube Comment Snob to work with YouTube's latest redesign, as well as to add compatibility for Firefox 3. It's available for download from the Mozilla Add-ons sandbox until it is approved by an AMO editor for mass consumption.

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.