If celebrities can name their children after types of fruit (Apple), who am I to judge the ‘offbeat’ blog comment names?

Lawn Mower
Phentermine
Cialis
Levitra
Career
Toyota
Paris Hilton Nude (imagine that)
Auto Lease
Used Car
Home Refinancing
Auto Parts
Mexico Phone Card

And a whole bunch more! Now here’s the special treatment I give them in WordPress using the Spam Karma plugin:

Options
Spam Karma
Blacklist

At the top in the ‘Add’ field:
Pull down ‘Regex Blacklist’
/Phentermine/ => Enter this in field
Click Add Entry (keep the number set at 100)

Repeat the above steps with ‘Regex Content Blacklist’ in the pull down menu.

Notes:

• When adding words to the blacklist, make sure to include the backslashes on either side: /word/. If you don’t - your legit commenters will be greeted with a bunch of garbled output once they submit a comment.
• I’m not sure how to add two words or a phrase - seems to work with single words only
• Try adding .info with ‘domain blacklist’ selected in the pull down options (sorry .info webmasters)
• Watch for commonalities in the spam. Are the domains mainly .info? Do they like to use .mp3 or video in the comments a lot? Add them to the blacklist.

There have been some slips and Spam Karma holds comments that really aren’t spam, but I do check daily for those and correct that as soon as I can.

Since I’ve taken time to really look through my blog spam comments, watching for commonly used words and manually adding those to the blacklist in Spam Karma - it has made a big difference as to what’s hitting air time on the blog and what isn’t.