Comment Filters and Elections

Disclaimer: I worked for Automattic - who back WordPress (WP) to a point that I believe WP would stall and fall without them - and I worked inside Akismet for over six years.

Given what I saw being submitted as spam I could have told you months before the event that Obama would win over Hillary. Blog comments mentioning Hillary as spam vs comments mentioning Obama as spam were 99-1.

WordPress has, since inception, a setting in Discussions. "When a comment contains any of these words in its content ... it will be held in the moderation queue. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress” – In this text box you can add your own spam words which will filter the comments when posted"

Sounds good - who wants their blog comments laced with profanity?

Search for 'bad word lists wordpress' - there are many. Copy & paste into the WP settings.

One 'bad word' that stands out (no pun intended) is Cialis

Any comment with that word is sent to Moderation.

Do you read all blog comments? If not then all comments saying Socialist, or Socialism are deleted. Or at the very least not published.

I am in no way saying WordPress is at fault. Other CMS's and online platforms will have similar 'bad words' lists and spam filtering.

There does seem to have a 'bad word' discussion to be had.

Reminds me of the Scunthorpe problem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem