Back in March, I published a list of spam keywords we use to moderate or auto-junk comments on this blog. The list is designed to automatically trash comments using words that have nothing to do with the topic of this blog. We currently moderate all comments published to the site to prevent spam from going live or showing up in our comments feed, and want to keep our moderation time to a minimum, so auto-junking off-topic comments is a great time saver.

Today, I've added the following terms to the list based on an increase in comment spam using the following terms:

soma
paxil
levitra
norco
tramadol
ringtones
polyphonic
meridia
ambien

As of today, we're receiving around 400 pieces of comment spam a day on this site. However, ~97% of that is automatically filtered into our spam folder. The remaining dozen or so spam emails are manually deleted before they go live.

Comment spam is a pain, but has become a manageable issue using prevention techniques like this one. The last thing I want to do is spend time manually deleting spam comments all day long or allowing them to go live on this site.