Replying to Question about NSG and stupidly short replies

Dear NS Mods,
I for one have taken a 4+ month leave of NS having been a member since Feb of 2004, and am blown away by the downward turn of the site, mostly NSG but also spilling over here and there to other forums.

I am wondering if a couple of options have been explored:

A site which I lurk on, supraforums, does not count off-topic posts towards post count at all. Is this an option for NS in terms of coding or controls? I think a HUGE portion of the dregs would be gone if they never obtained the status symbol of having a large number of posts.

Second, is there a way to prevent idiotically short posts such as "." "this," "threads" or any of the other 10000000 retarded and non-contributing statements which regularly appear on the site?

Can posts be filtered by length?

Just a couple of thoughts