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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.

New in This Version

• Removed PluginSponsors.com code following threats that the plugin would be expelled from the plugin repository for using the code to display sponsorship messages

For more details on the threats which have removed financial support for this plugin, see GregsPlugins.com. Following the initial threats, we have now been told that NO type of passive loading of an external resource for advertising purposes or sponsorship purposes will be permitted without explicit prior opt-in by the user -- i.e., no JavaScript, no iframes, no plain image loading of any kind. If you see any type of advertising of any kind in any plugin which loads any resource from any external server, you will know that this policy is not yet being fairly, uniformly and impartially applied. When it is fairly and uniformly and impartially applied, you will no longer see any type of advertising loading any external resource unless you have explicitly opted into seeing it.

For more details on what's new in the latest main release, version 1.4, please see the update announcement: WordPress Plugins Get Performance Boost

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 -- either via a plugin or now 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 AJAX 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.

Author: GregMulhauser