prevent users from using !!! ??? or HELP etc. in thread title
 

I would love to prevent my users from using bogus strings (like help, come on, you're in a support forum, you don't want to announce your marriage here, no?) and useless repetitions in their thread titles.

I made a plugin for 3.x to stop repetitive use of ! or ? or even !? here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=255588

It's for VB 3.x but it will work the same on 4.x.

I really don't know how you'd even try to stop your other examples- there would be so many variations you can't block them all...

true. but something like help is really quite useless, isnt' it?

If it was only "help" then I would agree, but if it's like "I need help installing windows 7" then "help" in the title is fine... We could test for "help" and nothing else in the string but "help?" or "help!" would still be allowed. We can use regular expressions to test for "help" followed by any special character, but then "i need help" or "help me" or "please help" or any number of possible combinations would still pass- no regular expression can be "smart" enough to determine if a title with "help" is good or not.

This is best left as a reminder in the forum rules rather than trying to program a hundred different ways it might be said.