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

Support

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

Brilliant, that solved it!

3 Likes

Topic		Replies	Views
Increase allowed length of watched words Feature watched-words	6	813	December 9, 2020
Using Regex with Watched Words Site Management reference , regex , watched-words , content	1	1699	June 14, 2024
Invalid regular expressions in 'Watched Words' makes no watched word work Bug watched-words	2	607	May 31, 2021
Watched word regular expression crash (2025) Bug watched-words , regex	7	112	October 7, 2025
How to use Discourse regexes with watched words? Support	8	2363	June 29, 2019

Can't enter watched words regex to catch phone numbers

Related topics