31

Saludos.

^^^ as you see, I just said hello in Spanish and nothing happened, despite "Saludos" means "greetings" in Spanish.

In Spanish Stack Exchange we noticed that a post cannot start with something as normal as "Hay", which in English can be considered a greeting, but in Spanish just means "there are" and seems to be a perfectly valid word to start a post with :)

All of this comes from the automatic removal of salutations that Stack Exchange has in place, which performs some checks and removes those strings that match this regex:

^                 # begins at start of body
\s*               # possible spaces
(
hii?(?![a-z])|    # any of these greeting words
hello|
h(e|a)y(?![a-z])|
dear|
greetings|
hai|
guys|
howdy|
h(i|e)ya|
hola
)
.*?               # followed by anything, up to...
(
[.,;!-]+          # one or more bits of punctuation
\s*               # possible spaces
|
(\r?\n)+          # one or more newlines
)

At the same time, we seem to somehow know if a post is in English or not by using the English threshold.

All of this taken into consideration, could we have language specific automatic removal of salutations so clear greetings in other languages are removed, while perfectly valid non-greeting words are preserved? Of course, I mean this for the languages that currently have a site.

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5

1 Answer 1

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10

The following list of words are now on the exclusion list:

  • Saludos
  • Hola
  • Queridos
  • Gracias
  • Estimados
  • Buen( o | a ) s
  • Que tal
Improve this answer
8
  • Buen(o|a|s) You sure Buens is a word? Shouldn't it be Buen(o|a)s??
    – iBug says Reinstate Monica
    Commented Feb 8, 2018 at 17:32
  • You're right, I typed it wrong above but it's correct in the system.
    – Juan M Staff
    Commented Feb 8, 2018 at 17:34
  • You may want to add Obrigados as well (aunque no es espanol).
    – iBug says Reinstate Monica
    Commented Feb 8, 2018 at 17:35
  • 2
    Thanks a lot, that's great news @JuanM! Probably better querid(o|a)s? so the s is optional and the same for estimad(o|a)s?.
    – fedorqui 'SO stop harming'
    Commented Feb 9, 2018 at 7:36
  • In fact we see some buen día, (sample), so Buen(o|a)?s? would also help.
    – fedorqui 'SO stop harming'
    Commented Feb 13, 2018 at 13:10
  • Could we also add Buen día? It occurs quite often: es.stackoverflow.com/q/153605/83
    – fedorqui 'SO stop harming'
    Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 11:36
  • @fedorqui I'll have that added as well!
    – Juan M Staff
    Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 21:26
  • 1
    Thanks, Juan! Let us know when it is live
    – fedorqui 'SO stop harming'
    Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 21:35

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