Do you find that the readers on your blog have a tendency to use “colorful” language when they leave comments. It can be a real pain having to go through the moderation queue to check up on any comments that got caught by your keyword filter, assuming that you do screen for foul language on your blog. This is a personal choice, of course, but if your blog is used as a front for your business, it is probably in your best interest to keep a careful eye on what commentators are saying.

By default in WordPress, you have the ability to screen for your chosen “banned” words and any comments that contain these words will end up in the moderation queue. Just because someone decides to use certain coarse language, however, does not mean that they don’t have something valuable to contribute. It may mean that you do want to censor some of that language, but manually editing each of these comments can be very time-consuming.

The new WP Content Filter WordPress plug-in addresses this very issue, scanning through any comments left on your blog for your pre-defined “flagged” terms. From there, you can choose how far you want to take your censorship. You can have all the letters replaced with a wildcard (the default setting uses an asterisk), keep the first letter, or keep both the first and last letter.

For example, if “bluefur” is one of your flagged terms, you can choose to have it automatically censored to *******, b******, or b*****r. You can also choose whether the specified keywords are or are not case-sensitive.

For more information on the plugin, including installation instructions, check out the download page at gwycon.com.