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Should 'Hi', 'thanks,' taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?

So you're not supposed to start questions with "Hello guys" or end them with a signature, right? Well, here's an idea: Detect common cases of this and warn the user that this is unwanted cruft.

So, if your question starts with:

  • hello
  • hi
  • hey
  • etc.

...or ends with:

...then a box pops up that says:

Your question starts with "hello". This is considered unnecessary; please remove it.

...or:

Your question ends with your username. You do not need to "sign" your questions; please remove it.

...and so on. It shouldn't be blocking, just informational.

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Hmm... I wouldn't usually vote to close as dupe because of an answer, but since this is an Official Canonical Jeff Answer, I guess it qualifies for an exception. Nice, @JoshCaswell. –  Pops Jul 16 '12 at 15:20
1  
@Popular: The Jefficial answer still counts for something, huh? I figured random would just start erasing history around the beginning of the month. Eventually there'd be a Meta question: "Why is there no user #1?" –  Josh Caswell Jul 16 '12 at 16:44
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marked as duplicate by Josh Caswell, kiamlaluno, Manishearth, Pops, jonsca Jul 18 '12 at 3:21

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

1 Answer

Greetings like this are actually already filtered out automatically. There is a regex which checks for the presence of things like that at the beginning of a post and just strips them out silently when it's posted. It does not for signature sorts of things at the end though:

The thanks parts at the end of posts are much more difficult / risky to detect, so we are not touching those for now.

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The regex is posted at meta.stackoverflow.com/a/93989 –  Kevin Vermeer Dec 6 '11 at 20:18
 
Thanks @KevinVermeer, I was looking for that post but couldn't find it. I edited that into the answer. –  nhinkle Dec 6 '11 at 20:19
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