SOLVED: 1600 Word Black List Bad Words For Your Comment Filter

As soon as you open comments to the entire Internet, you have problems.

It’s important to create a community and to keep your visitors engaged. However, wide open comments leads to bots and professional promoters creating thousands of garbage comments with links back to unscrupulous websites.

One way to block unwanted comments is to use a simple blacklist. If the word appears in a comment, the system rejects the entire comment.

In our case our blocked words list became corrupted and we needed to rebuild a new banned list almost from scratch. We were able to copy only about the last 500 blocked words from our previous list of many 1000’s. We added those to a few dozen public domain block lists, and removed words that made sense for our sites. Now we are making our comment filter banned words list available to everyone for free.

Here is our list of 1600 words that cannot be used in the Commendts section of any of our WordPress sites:

There are several categories of words that should be blocked in a comment filter to maintain a safe and respectful online environment:

1. Profanity: This includes swear words and vulgar language that can be offensive to some users.
2. Hate Speech: Words that promote violence or discrimination against individuals or groups based on attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, or gender should be blocked.
3. Bullying and Harassment: Words used to intimidate, control, or harm individuals should be blocked.
4. Personal Information: Any words or phrases that could be used to identify an individual’s private information (like addresses, phone numbers, or social security numbers) should be blocked to protect user privacy.
5. Spam: This includes repetitive messages, irrelevant promotions, or links to malicious websites.
6. Offensive Slurs: Any racial, ethnic, or religious slurs should be blocked to maintain respect and decency.

NOTE: There are words in this list that are not offensive and may be suitable for your site, so it’s advisable to review and remove those that are appropriate. We chose to ban certain words because they were not relevant to our website’s content. Topics related to politics, religion, or pharmaceuticals might not be inherently problematic, but if the don’t align with our content, so we exclude them. If your website focuses on medicine, for example, you might find it necessary to unblock terms from the comments blacklist, such as ’10mg’, ‘100mg’, ‘prescription’, which are pertinent to your discussions.