YouTube's worst comments blocked by filter

YouTube Comment Snob automatically hides any comments posted on the video-sharing website that fail to meet a range of good English guidelines.

The filter can be set to hide comments with misspelled words, swearing and excessive punctuation.

Comments that do not begin with a capital letter, or which are composed entirely of capital letters, can also be blocked. Users are able to personalise their censorship settings depending on the quality of posts they want to read

Malicious commenters - known as trolls – are the bane of many websites, but YouTube has become notorious for hosting to some of the most confrontational and ill-formed comment exchanges on the internet.

Discussions about even the most inconsequential videos regularly degenerate into profanity-strewn slanging matches, many with a xenophobic undercurrent.

YouTube Comment Snob has been created by an individual software designer called Christopher Finke and has no connection to the official YouTube site, which has a separate system that allows users to give a “thumbs down” to comments they disagree with.

The comment blocker, which is only available for people using the Firefox browser, has already earned rave reviews from YouTube regulars.

“This is a wonderful idea, now all I need is a similar filter for the entire web,” wrote Aletha on the popular Boing Boing blog.