Is this comma use unnecessary or wrong?

Solution 1:

There are very few really hard-and-fast rules when it comes to commas in English.

However, commas are there for a reason: to aid the reader in parsing the sentences he is currently reading by splitting them up into logical chunks that give hints as to what belongs together with what, and where the sentence would be broken up with pauses in speech. This particular comma seems rather more likely to cause confusion than aid the reader in doing any such thing.

The way the sentence is phrased and punctuated, “matching the filter [tag]” looks like it ought to be a partipial adjunct, a detached modifier to an element earlier in the clause. Normally, such adjuncts modify the closest noun phrase that can be interpreted as a subject:

She came walking down the street, singing a little tune.

Singing here moves back through the sentence to the nearest subject, she, and modifies it; the structure is equivalent to:

She [singing a little tune] came walking down the street.

. Similarly, a plausible (though semantically nonsensical) reading of your sentence here is:

There are no items for you [matching the filter ‘tag’] to review.

– which implies that you are the one matching the filter “[tag]”. This is of course not the intended meaning—the items are the ones who match (or don’t match, as is the case here) the filter, not you.

Removing the comma does not utterly unambiguously force the correct reading of the sentence, but it does make it more likely, since one of the key features of free-standing participial adjuncts in speech is that they are set off by a pause (and thus in writing usually also by commas). Removing the commas (and, by extension probably also the pause) at least reduces ambiguity, as you correctly intuitively identified.

An even better way to make sure that the sentence is read as unambiguously as possible would be to ‘reattach’ the modifier and place it inside the sentence, right next to the element it modifies. I would also add a currently, just because I think it sounds better given the context. So I would suggest that you suggest that the phrase be rephrased to:

There are currently no items matching the filter “[tag]” for you to review.

Or alternatively, as K suggests in a comment, use a relative clause (in either position):

There are currently no items that match the filter “[tag]” for you to review.
There are currently no items for you to review that match the filter “[tag]”.