While I wasn’t planning on making a new plugin, this one just presented itself and had to be done.
Over on the Advanced WordPress facebook group, a post was made about an amusing javascript plugin called echochamber.js, which let you easily add a comment area to your site which looked like a normal form but in reality didn’t actually post to the website. Instead, the comment is saved to Local Storage so it appears to save (and if you come back to the page, you will still see your comment there) but your comments are never seen by anyone.
It’s a tongue-in-cheek way of keeping snarky/nasty comments off your content, while giving people the appearance and feeling of user engagement. Looking at the code, I saw how easy it would fit into a WordPress plugin so I whipped this one together. All credit for the functionality goes to Tessalt on GitHub, since it’s all her code: I just wrapped things up so it tucked nicely into the WordPress ecosystem.
If you’d like to take a look, you can find the plugin in the Echo Chamber Comments in the WordPress repository.