Announcing Comment Snob

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

Before:	After:

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.

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.

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.

Try it out by first viewing this video without TubeStop: Rock Yo Hips. (I recommend muting your speakers; the content of the video is terrible, but it was the first video I could find with ads.) You’ll see around the 15-second mark an ad pops up over the bottom 15% of the video.

Now install TubeStop, restart Firefox, and view the video again. You’ll notice that while the video still sucks, there are no ads layered on it. I don’t know how long this will be the case, but it works for now.

Update: It looks like Google has removed all video ads for now. I’ll update this post if I come across a video that still has them. Maybe I should rename this post to “TubeStop also stops YouTube ads… FOREVER”.

If you like TubeStop, check out my other YouTube-specific Firefox extension: YouTube Comment Snob. It adds powerful filtering controls to YouTube comment threads.

You can install TubeStop from the TubeStop homepage.

What is TubeStop? It’s an extension for Firefox that prevents YouTube videos from automatically playing when you open the page.

If YouTube (and home computers capable of producing video) had been around when I was 13, I think this is very similar to something I would have done. Instead, my sister Gina and I made fake radio shows using the WAV recorder that comes with Windows and a sound-effects CD we got from the library.

You can install TubeStop 1.1 from the TubeStop homepage.

TubeStop is a browser extension that stops YouTube videos from automatically beginning playback when the page is loaded.

Currently, this extension only works on videos at YouTube.com, not on YouTube videos embedded on non-YouTube.com websites with autoplay enabled.

TubeStop is compatible with Firefox 1.5 – 2.0.0.*, the latest Flock builds, and Netscape Navigator 9.0. If you’re having trouble using the extension, you can either e-mail me at cfinke@gmail.com or leave a comment below.

You can install TubeStop 1.0 from the TubeStop homepage.