Hi! We’re experiencing a lot of spam that’s not caught by Akismet. The messages usually have (international) phone numbers in them which made us think of using a regex to catch them. After experimenting a bit we found the following expression: (?:\+|00)?\d{1,3}?[-\s]?\d{2,4}[-\s]?\d{2,4}[-\s]?\d{…

I think it’s picking up on the pipes | when the regex is copy-pasted in. I think if you type it in manually it may ignore them as separators and allow you to do it as one entry. :crossed_fingers: ETA: From a quick test, this seems promising. :+1:

Can't enter watched words regex to catch phone numbers

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bartv (Bart ) May 17, 2025, 7:27am 4

Brilliant, that solved it!

3 Likes

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Can't enter watched words regex to catch phone numbers

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