After reading the article, be sure and check out the filter in action
at http://stupidfilter.org/random.php - every time you hit that URL,
it shows you a real-world example of a stupid-a.s post that the
filtering algorithm has detected (and would screen out).

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/11/12/100954554/index.htm

OMG!!! The end of online stupidity?

By Josh Quittner, Fortune executive editor
November 7 2007: 12:17 PM EST

(Fortune Magazine) -- Internet veterans have long complained about the
steady erosion of civility -- and worse, intelligence -- in online
discourse. Initially the phenomenon seemed to be a seasonal disorder.
It occurred every September when freshmen showed up for college and
went online. Tasting for the first time the freedom and power of the
Internet, the newbies would behave like a bunch of drunken fraternity
pledges, filling electronic bulletin boards with puerile remarks until
the upperclassmen could whip them into shape.

Things took a dramatic turn for the worse in 1993, when AOL loosed its
tens of thousands -- and then millions -- of users onto the Net. The
event came to be known as the Endless September, and true to its name,
it continues to this day.

It's a serious problem. Fools and bandwidth hogs have a way of driving
traffic away from the most successful online destinations, a
phenomenon that could ruin the emerging social networks and
user-generated aggregators like Digg.

But there's still hope for intelligent life on the Internet. A team of
software developers is hard at work on a "stupid filter" that promises
to do to idiotic online comments what a spam filter does to junk and
unwanted e-mail: put it in a place where it can't hurt anyone anymore.

That's the mission, anyway, of the cadre of techies toiling under the
leadership of Gabriel Ortiz, a 27-year-old systems administrator in
Albuquerque. Ortiz's team is readying a free, open-source version they
hope to release by year's end and make available as a standard plug-in
on the popular Firefox browser by early next year.

How does it work? Say a user wants to post a really, really dumb
comment on, for example, cnnmoney.com, where some of you might be
reading this now.

If cnnmoney had the filter installed on its servers, it would
intercept the comment just before it was published and flash a little
alert at the author that reads: "This comment is more or less
unintelligible. Please try to restate it."

[...]