I can understand that there is a minimum number of characters (to prevent spam)
but at the same time I sometimes want to include a deal of information into my comments, and end up short by a few characters, and it usually ends up being when responding directly to users that have longer names.
the system already understands to look up names when an "@" is entered into the comment box, so maybe having the system ignore the "@", and the characters that follow (unless it does not resolve to a user name)
this is a lot more feasible then another similar request that ignores all "`" marks, but when I consider the abuse of that it just makes my head spin.