There is a steady erosion of civility and intelligence in online discussions, but some techies are trying to change that. This problem is serious because bandwidth hogs and fools have the tendency to drive traffic away from the most successful online destinations. Yet there is still hope for intelligence on the Internet because a team of software developers is creating a 'stupid filter' that pledges to treat idiotic online comments like a spam filter treats junk and unwanted e-mail by putting it in a place where it can no longer hurt anybody. That is the mission of the group of techies led by Gabriel Ortiz, a 27-year-old systems administrator in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The team led by Ortiz is preparing a free, open-source version they hope to release by the end of 2007 and make available as a basic plug-in on the popular Firefox browser by early 2008. If a user wants to post a really dumb comment online, the filter would intercept the comment and flash a warning alert to the author asking him or her to restate their comment. From a social and programming perspective, it is hard to build software that distinguishes intellectual comments from stupid ones because of irony and sarcasm. Writers can intentionally misspell words or break the solid grammar rules just to prove a point or emphasize something, so the stupid-filter team is attempting to accommodate such behavior with various rules and markers. Interestingly, Ortiz's team is tapping the intelligence of crowds to debug its filter by asking readers to visit their site, www.stupidfilter.org, to assist them in rating a selection of potentially dumb posts from YouTube. Ortiz's stupid-filter is promising because offers of help have been made from all over the world, and there might even be a business in it.