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newbie_99
“ok”
Too short · 2 / 25 chars
regularposter
“Great plugin, works exactly as described!”
42 / 25 chars · OK
chars
0 / 25 min
Free phpBB Extension

Minimum Post
Characters.

Enforce meaningful post length on a per-forum basis. No filler, no one-word replies — your forums, your standards.

Free & Open Source phpBB 3.3.x PHP 7.2+
View Docs
Per-Forum
Granular control
0 Deps
No Core required
Full Unicode
mb_strlen aware

Keep control 👀

A focused extension that solves one problem well — keeping post quality up without getting in the way of your community.

📋

Per-Forum Minimums

Set a different character minimum for each forum, directly from ACP → Forums → Edit Forum. Set it to 0 to disable for that forum entirely.

Global setting auto-merge Per-forum
👥

Group Bypass Permissions

Exempt any combination of user groups via phpBB’s native group permissions. Administrators are always unconditionally bypassed — no config needed.

Group permissions Admins auto-exempt
🏷️

BBCode-Stripped Counting

Tags are stripped and whitespace collapsed before counting — so users can’t pad posts with hidden markup. [b]Hi[/b] counts as 2, not 9.

Anti-padding Whitespace collapsed

Smart counting 🧮

Before comparing against the minimum, the extension strips all BBCode and collapses whitespace. What you see is what actually counts — no way around it.

Note: quoted content from other posts does count toward the total. Only the BBCode markup itself is stripped, not the body text inside quote tags.

character_count_examples
[b]Hi[/b] Hi 2 chars
[b]Hello[/b] Hello 5 chars
[quote=”X”]quoted[/quote] reply quoted reply 12 chars
こんにちは こんにちは 5 chars

Whitespace is also collapsed — extra spaces between words don’t inflate the count.

💡

phpBB’s global minimum always takes precedence

phpBB ships with its own board-wide Minimum characters per post setting under ACP → General → Post Settings. This extension’s per-forum values layer on top of it — if the global minimum is 10 and a forum’s is 5, users still need 10 characters. The higher threshold always wins.

Up in two minutes 🕐

Okay, maybe five. Anyway, it’s a standard phpBB extension install — no shell access, no Composer required… and no VaultBB Core needed.

1
Download and unzip the extension package.
2
Upload the vaultbb/minpostchars folder to your board under ext/vaultbb/minpostchars/
3
Go to ACP → Customise → Manage Extensions, find Minimum Post Characters and click Enable. Database migrations run automatically.
4
To exempt a user group, go to ACP → Permissions → Groups, select the group, and toggle the Can bypass minimum post characters permission.
5
Edit any forum under ACP → Forums → Manage Forums and set the Minimum characters per post field. Done.

Requirements

phpBB3.3.x
PHP7.2+
LicenseGPL-2.0

Package

Composer namevaultbb/minpostchars
Install pathext/vaultbb/minpostchars/

Release Notes

A compact view of every update to Minimum Post Characters.

v1.0.4 Current Feb 21, 2026
  • FixedSeveral issues with displaying linked errors
v1.0.0 Feb 20, 2026
  • AddedInitial Release

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