Andrew (the Timelord lookalike at Wongablog) has been having some trouble with certain words causing comments to disappear into a black hole. Like a fool, I left a nice comment telling him my theory of what might be happening, but used certain words as examples so that my comment itself went into the same black hole.

I came across this page about spam words in the WordPress codex. It suggests you put them into your moderation list, but I think they are somehow in Andrew’s blacklist, even though they do not show up in the admin panel, and I am guessing that this might have something to do with him having been a WP1.5 user who upgraded. I am willing to wager a small amount that he has some file or other which contains the words in that list knocking around, and its getting referenced by the moderation/blacklisting module.

It is interesting to see what words are (or were at the time) judged to be likely indicators of spam content. Some are to be expected – casinos, day-trading, phentermine, top-site, and viagra – but what is that nestled towards the bottom of the list? “valeofglamorganconservatives”

You couldn’t make it up could you? I bet there is a story there. Perhaps a local Conservative association letting its domain name lapse and it getting taken over by some evil spammers? Or were they branching out into spam themselves to try and bolster their finances?