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There are two parts to this feature.

On one hand you need to add Bad Words into the list. This, you already did.

By default the feature is disabled. This is the second part necessary: you need to activate it. Go to Components, Admin Tools, Web Application Firewall, Configure WAF and click the Request Filtering tab. Set "Anti-spam filtering based on Bad Words list" to Yes.

Now any request going through Joomla which has a GET or POST parameter that contains any of the bad words (case-insensitive) will trigger a blocked request.

For example, if you use the bad word foobar and your form contains the text "This is a FooBar test" will be blocked. Do note that this only applies to whole words. If someone enters "This is a FooBarBazBat test" they will NOT be blocked because it doesn't match the bad word.

This is NOT meant to be a complete anti-spam solution, just something to prevent the most blatant spam. For example, we used to receive a lot of contact forms with unsolicited offers for certain pharmaceutical products or Russian spam. Needless to say, these messages contained some very common words we would never expect in legitimate communication so it made perfect sense to implement this feature in Admin Tools.

You're welcome, Andy!

We barely noticed it's a new lockdown to be honest. We were already being responsible and had reduced our outings to the bare minimum, always with masks when going outside and so on. The only thing that really sucks is that we can't take our daughter outside for a walk.