How To Set Minimum Comment Length In WordPress

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Most of us turn on comments in our sites to start a discussion and reach out more people. But some people comment just to get a link back to their own site. Their comments will consist of things like "nice post", "thanks" and all stuff.

If you're running a big website, then moderating these crappy comments will waste a lot of time. So how about setting a minimum character count length on your comments.

Add following snippet to your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'preprocess_comment', 'minimal_comment_length' );

function minimal_comment_length( $commentdata ) {
    $minimalCommentLength = 20;

    if ( strlen( trim( $commentdata['comment_content'] ) ) < $minimalCommentLength )
        {
        wp_die( 'All comments must be at least ' . $minimalCommentLength . ' characters long.' );
        }
    return $commentdata;
}

Save your file. That's it. You can also replace 20 in the above code with your custom value.

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