13

This question asked in July explains why it is not possible for the time being to submit content in posts or comments that contains Unihan characters. It’s a spammer thing, fair enough.

As snailboat’s answer makes clear, the workaround for posts is to convert your Unihan text to HTML entities: these are parsed and appear correctly.

However, HTML entities are still HTML and as such are not parsed at all in comments, as this answer by AstroCB confirms. In other words, since Unihan glyphs are banned from both posts and comments and HTML entities are not parsed in comments, it seems to be completely impossible to post text containing Unihan glyphs in comments at all, except on sites where the ban has been manually removed, like Japanese.SE.

This seems like a rather substantial limitation. And in any case, the blanket ban on Unihan is unduly heavy-handed and inflexible (not to mention perplexing to the user, when the only feedback you get is “Body/comments cannot contain that content”).

In this comment, tchrist suggested that the ability to post Unihan glyphs could be made a rep-based privilege; that is, a certain amount of reputation is required to include these glyphs, otherwise it fails. A requirement of, say, 125 rep points would presumably cut off at least 99.99% of spammers, and it would have the added benefit of being able to maintain—and broaden—the restriction indefinitely to mitigate spam, while still allowing legitimate users to post relevant content.

(The feedback message would have to be improved as well, though; something like, “Due to large volumes of spam written in certain non-Latin scripts, you need at least 125 reputation points to be able to include non-Latin text in your post” or words to that effect.)

Can this be implemented?

Alternatively, as pointed out in Normal Human’s reply, since comments already require a certain amount of rep meant to deter absolute newcomers (and, by extension, also spammers), can the ban just be removed from comments and applied only to posts?

(Editing this just to bump it on the front page, to hopefully have some kind of discussion or feedback on the matter.)

Improve this question
6
  • 2
    Stack Exchange sites are [usually] written in English. There's also a French ban, a German ban, an Italian ban, a Spanish ban... on most sites (except French.SE, German.SE, etc.) - this isn't anything specifically against Arabic; there's no such thing as an "Arabic ban", it's just a matter of keeping the sites readable for everyone. Stack Exchange sites are not discussion forums, they're Q&A sites: what's the actual need to be able to write comments in anything but English anyway?
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 19:04
  • 2
    @Mat'sMug Apart from the numerous individual language SEs where entire questions, answers, and comments are frequently written in other languages, it is not at all uncommon for someone to have to include some content written in various other languages on many different SE sites, even if the post/comment itself is in English. For example, there was recently (?) a question on SciFi.SE about what the control panel on a spacecraft said; the text in question was written in Hindi (i.e., Devanāgarī) and was by necessity quoted as such in both answer and comments.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 19:07
  • There are also cases like my own answer here, as well as the comments to that answer. That was written before the ban took place, but the comments would be utterly impossible to post as it is now.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 19:09
  • Ah, I see. Sorry I misunderstood your question.
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 19:13
  • 1
    I think you can post arabic text: كمنتيشسيش
    – Mohammad
    Commented Sep 20, 2015 at 20:39
  • 1
    @Mhmd Thanks for that—I’ll delete the references to Arabic, then (been too lazy to add an Arabic keyboard layout and type random stuff in myself). :-)
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Sep 20, 2015 at 20:42

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
8

The solution should be to simply drop the check for comments. They already require nontrivial reputation (even here on Meta), making other filters redundant.

Improve this answer
3
  • Good point! (Can’t believe I typed out an entire post about this without realising that the rep-based restriction would be identical to the already existing one required to comment in the first place… duh!)
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Sep 20, 2015 at 20:30
  • I'd call 50 rep a trivial amount of reputation.
    – Vogel612's Shadow
    Commented Sep 20, 2015 at 21:55
  • 2
    @Vogel612'sShadow Context matters. Could be trivial for a knowledgeable user. Nontrivial for a spammer posting Q.강남풀싸롱 매직미러이란?![010 and so forth.
    – user259867
    Commented Sep 20, 2015 at 22:02

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .