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I recently added this "elderly filter" for our customer reviews at work. It detects if the review was (mostly) written with caps lock on, it should change it the review to title case.

I noticed we had a lot of messages that were written in all caps, so it would make sense to convert it to title case, since it's generally easier to read and sounds less screamy.

This seems like an obvious choice to convert it, but almost every major website I've been to doesn't convert it (like Facebook, Amazon, and most others). So would it make sense to convert the text or not?

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Reviews are a very tricky case because if people see you altering user reviews, it may come off as you censoring the reviews. If someone writes an all caps review because they are yelling about bad service, it may look like you changed the case so it doesn't look as bad.

I think there are only three ways to go about this:

  1. Try to avoid the all caps on the client side so the user can't blame you for changing their content. You can have a caps lock warning on the input to minimize accidental all caps submissions or even a warning on submit that you will be changing the case of their all cap post.

  2. Depending on the volume of reviews coming in, I would consider flagging the all caps posts instead of automatically changing them. Then you can have someone go through and decide if the post is in all caps for a reason or if it's an accident.

  3. Leave it as is. This is probably the safest route. If users get the mindset that you are changing reviews in a deceitful way, it will make all of your reviews, good or bad, useless as the trust will be gone.

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Title case of user submitted text is a problem because of names such as MacDonald, acronyms such as BBC, etc. You can code round these cases but unless you control the dataset from the start, there will always be new cases. I have done title case on large datasets but I had the data to begin with and hence could check through and fix any oddities, and even so I still don't like doing it.

So my advice is either (a) leave it or (b) alert the user as another answer suggests.

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