Definitive answer on Filter_HTML status, update or alternative, please?

I have a site running on php 4.4.x and this seems to be the only site that doesn’t want to use filter_HTML correctly. I have gone through and removed ampersands, HOWEVER, this seems to have screwed up the word/character limiting aspect of the plugin. For example, I have this working perfectly on one site:

{exp:filter_html units="words" if_exceeds="20" stop_after="10" rules="-*" ellipsis="…<a href='{url_title_path=news/article}'>More »</a>"}{body}{/exp:filter_html}

But when I put it on the site running 4.4.x, everything but the “rules” parameter is ignored.

I was reading this thread about how the original developer “passed the baton” - and that was late 2005.

I’m trying to reduce load time on a page, and I have the filter_html plugin wrapped in the word_limit plugin. With 5-20 entries on a page, that’s a lot of extra work, especially if the filter_html plugin can just take care of limiting the words itself.

Can someone answer defninitively: Is there a version newer than 1.0, or an alternate plugin I can use to do what it does? I’m going to reinstall this plugin and remove as few ampersands as possible this time to see if I can get it working! Thanks for any help here.