We now automatically remove *salutations* from posts as they are entered.

I got really tired of performing this edit over and over, so anything matching the form of …

    ^\s*           # begins at start of body
    (
    hi(?![a-z])|   # any of these greeting words
    hello|
    hey(?![a-z])|
    dear|
    guys|
    howdy|
    h(i|e)ya|
    hola
    )
    .*?            # followed by anything, up to...
    (
    [.,;!-]+\s?    # one or more bits of punctuation followed by possible spaces
    |
    (\r?\n)+       # one or more newlines
    )


… is removed automagically at the time of submission to the server.

The *thanks* parts at the end of posts are much more difficult / risky to detect, so we are not touching those for now.

Some stats based on a local copy of the Stack Overflow database: **questions starting with …**

- hi 300,455 
- hello 107,646
- hey 22,697
- dear 3,998
- guys 921
- howdy 483
- hiya 344
- heya 207
- hola 56
- hihi 6
- salutations 5