I turned off blog comments on the NPT Blog for awhile, 'cause I was getting so sick and tired of scanning through all the comment spam.

This is an example of a comment posted to the NPT Blog.

rock

Watts Murphy, Roisin Genocide Organ Dandy Warhols Blood Has Been Shed Stapp, Scott Fall Silent Siouxsie & the Banshees Eyes All That Remains Hendrix, Jimi Shock Skrape Tanita Tikaram New Metal Generation Hell Is For Heroes Strange Land Waits, Tom D…

Duh.

What exactly is the point of this kind of crap other than to waste our time?

Well, the 'comment spammer' was hoping my blog was set to 'auto-approve' all comments.

Duh! Again!

I've set my blog up so that people may post comments, but I must approve each comment separately before it appears on the site.

So, the comment spammer is STILL wasting my (and his) time when his comment shows up in moderation.

One workaround is called the 'Comment Blacklist'.

The 'comment blacklist' is a list of words that you want completely blacklisted from your blog.

The Wordpress blog interface warns that you should "Be very careful what you add here, because if a comment matches something here it will be completely nuked and there will be no notification. Remember that partial words can match, so if there is any chance something here might match it would be better to put it in the moderation box above."

Before I built a list of words to blacklist, I was receiving about 100 comment spams a day.

Now the spam is down to a trickle of one every few days.

Here is a list of 102 words I've blacklisted. This list isn't all encompassing - I left out the 4-letter varieties for the purpose of this post.

-online
4u
adipex
advicer
ambien
baccarrat
black jack
blackjack
bllogspot
booker
byob
carisoprodol
car-rental-e-site
car-rentals-e-site
cash advance
casino
casinos
celebrex
chatroom
cialis
closet organizer
craps
credit-report-4u
cwas
cyclen
cyclobenzaprine
dating-e-site
day-trading
debt-consolidation-consultant
discreetordering
drug
dutyfree
duty-free
equityloans
fioricet
flowers-leading-site
freenet
freenet-shopping
gambling
health-insurancedeals-4u
holdem
holdempoker
holdemsoftware
holdemtexasturbowilson
homeequityloans
homefinance
hotel-dealse-site
hotele-site
hotelse-site
hydrocodone
incest
insurancedeals-4u
insurance-quotesdeals-4u
ionamin
ionamin
jrcreations
levitra
loan
macinstruct
meridia
mortgage-4-u
mortgagequotes
online-gambling
onlinegambling-4u
ottawavalleyag
ownsthis
palm-texas-holdem-game
paxil
penis
pharmacy
phentermine
poker
poker-chip
poze
propecia
renova
rental-car-e-site
retin-a
retirement planning
roulette
shemale
shoes
slot
slot-machine
soma
sonata
taboo
teen
texas-holdem
thorcarlson
top-e-site
top-site
tramadol
trim-spa
ultram
valeofglamorganconservatives
viagra
vicodin
vioxx
xanax
xenical
zolus

Their comments would be immediately and forever deleted.

So, it's a trade-off, to be sure.

Creating an all-ecompassing blacklist preserves the blog owner's time but risks wasting their valued readers' time.

There's no good solution, although a blogger might consider removing a blacklisted word for a short period of time if they wrote an entry around a particular topic and expected comments to include that word.

Other than that, I highly recommend using the "Comment Blacklist" in WordPress as a good antedote to dealing with the idiots who leave comment spam.

Need help right now? Visit the NPT forum.

'Til next time, promote and prosper!

Cheers,

---

Rosalind Gardner is author of the best-selling "Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in ONE Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online.

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