Plugin / Greg's Comment Length Limiter

Description

NOTE: Please do NOT use the WordPress forums to seek support for this plugin. Support for GCLL is handled on our own site.

This plugin provides a configurable limit on the length of comments left in the comment form, with a character countdown displayed for the user and dynamically updated with each keypress.

My complete portfolio of 50 plugins, including this one, and also including the new Faster Cache for WordPress is now available for adoption!

New in This Version

• On WordPress 4.5 and above, the plugin now includes additional enforcement of the comment length limit by modifying WordPress’s hard-coded default maxlength of 65525 for the comment form’s textarea.

Background

Most of us welcome comments on our blog posts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we — or our readers — like to see comments reaching into thousands of words. Readers may be discouraged from commenting themselves (or reading comments at all) when they see very long entries left by others, and during times of high load, the significant performance overheads associated with retrieving and displaying long comments can slow even the speediest dedicated servers.

From the perspective of SEO (search engine optimization), very long comments also dilute the impact of the author’s original post by relegating it to a small proportion of the overall content available on the page. For advanced SEO capabilities, see Greg’s High Performance SEO Plugin.

The primary approach to limiting the total volume of comment material displayed on a page has long been to break up comments across several pages, usually with the built-in paged comment feature introduced in WordPress 2.7.

This plugin provides one more tool by directly limiting the length of any one comment. A lightweight JavaScript counter — just 5 lines of inline JavaScript, with no gigantic external libraries to load — lets the user know how many characters they have left to complete their entry. Any additional text which might be inserted beyond the configured limit via cutting and pasting is automatically trimmed to length.

For users without JavaScript, the counter degrades gracefully, providing a visual indication of the preferred (but unenforced) length limit, without the countdown feature.

For coders, the plugin provides additional configuration options via direct calls.

Fine Print

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.