$tempmsg =~ s/\s*#.+$//; # comments

my @check =
    grep { length($_) < 80 } # no super-long votes
    map  { s/^\s*//; s/\s*$//; s/\s+/ /; $_ } # space normalization
    split /[;,()]+/, $tempmsg; # the dividers

for my $tempmsg2 ( @check ) {
                      #  (allowed chars..................)   (strip    (and the vote)
                      #                                       extras)
    if ( $tempmsg2 =~ /^([a-zA-Z0-9-_{}^\[\]\|=\s\+\*\#\.]+?)[\s\+\-]*(\+\+|--)$/ ) {
        my ( $word, $plusorminus ) = ( lc($1), $2 );
        next if $word =~ /\.\s/; # try to avoid sentence punctuation, but leave domain names
        next if $seen{$word}; $seen{$word} = 1;