iandunn / compassionate-comments

WordPress plugin that encourages authors of toxic comments to re-phrase them to be more kind instead.

Compassionate Comments

Why do we have tools to check our spelling, but not to check if we're being kind to each other?

This plugin checks the intent of a comment before it's submitted. If the author is being rude or disrespectful, it will encourage them to think twice, and give them a chance to rephrase their comment to be more kind before they submit it.

Google's free Perspective API is used to determine the characteristics of the comment, which means that all comments will be sent to their servers for analysis. You can optionally request that they not store your comments for their future research.

The Perspective API can only analyze comments written in English, Spanish, and French. Comments written in other languages will be accepted without any analysis or content warnings.

The inspiration for this comes from Tristan Harris' TED talk about designing technology to reflect human values, and from ReThink.

Example

Setup

If you just want to use the plugin, you can install the packaged version from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

If you want to contribute to the plugin, then follow these steps to setup the development version:

• git clone https://github.com/iandunn/compassionate-comments.git
• cd compassionate-comments
• npm install
• npm start

After the initial setup, simply run npm start while you're editing files.

To build the distributed version, run npm run build.