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I can't create a post with the following characters.

There are errors for both the Japanese and Chinese characters.

Here is the post in question What languages does the character encoding UTF-8 support?. It is peculiar that it supports 59 languages besides Japanese and Chinese.

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  • 2
    It seems to be Unihan characters that aren't allowed. If I remove the single Chinese character from your Japanese example, it doesn't trigger an error. Made-in-Japan Unihan characters like U+8FBB do trigger the error. The filter doesn't seem to be in place on language sites.
    – user215040
    Jul 29, 2015 at 1:48
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    What site are you trying to post that on? Here?
    – tchrist
    Jul 29, 2015 at 1:59
  • @tchrist superuser.com originally, but the same issue appears here to.
    – William
    Jul 29, 2015 at 2:03
  • @LiamWilliam Does SU usually get postings with Unihan in it? Seems like the wrong target audience to me. :)
    – tchrist
    Jul 29, 2015 at 2:05
  • @tchrist here is the post in question superuser.com/questions/946612 No it doesn't but it is peculiar that it supports 59 languages besides Japanese and Chinese.
    – William
    Jul 29, 2015 at 2:08
  • @tchrist I've used Unihan here in what I think are legitimate posts: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243160
    – user215040
    Jul 29, 2015 at 5:41
  • I am unsure why spammers would bother sending Chinese spam to a website which is used almost exclusively by non-Chinese speakers.
    – March Ho
    Sep 5, 2015 at 14:08
  • @MarchHo Well I think Japanese probably do and a subset of Japanese includes Chinese. But either way you are right it doesn't make sense.
    – William
    Sep 5, 2015 at 14:11

2 Answers 2

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I have a workaround:

什麽是Unicode(統一碼/標準萬國碼)? in Trad'l Chinese
什么是Unicode(统一码)? in Simplified Chinese
ユニコードとは何か？in Japanese

If you replace the Unihan characters with HTML entities representing those characters, they go through the filter (as of this writing). That is, replace 何 with 何, and so on.

The post you linked to in your comment uses Markdown to create a block of preformatted text. But HTML entities won't show up properly in that sort of text block. If you try putting in HTML entities right now, it'll end up like this:

什麽是Unicode(統一碼/標準萬國碼)? in Trad'l Chinese  
什么是Unicode(统一码)? in Simplified Chinese  
ユニコードとは何か？in Japanese

To get the entities to show up properly, you'll have to use the HTML <pre> tag instead, like this:

什麽是Unicode(統一碼/標準萬國碼)? in Trad'l Chinese  
什么是Unicode(统一码)? in Simplified Chinese  
ユニコードとは何か？in Japanese

That should solve your problem for the time being.

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    A webservice to convert these strings can be found here
    – March Ho
    Aug 16, 2015 at 3:11
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There’s been a lot of CJK spam on SU and Meta lately; probably that’s why it’s Forbidden.

Zap!

the red zapper forbids U+4EC0

If it had let me enter it, this posting would have looked something like this:

image of forbidden character posting of U+4EC0

That character is:

U+4EC0  CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-4EC0
  Mandarin     SHI2 SHEN2
  Cantonese    sam6 sap6 zaap6
  JapaneseKun  KUMI TOU MAJIRU
  JapaneseOn   SHUU JUU
  Korean       SIP CIP
  HanyuPinlu   shen2(4045) shen5(17)
  Vietnamese   thập
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    This is correct. We were getting a deluge of Chinese-language spam, and it was evolving so we just blocked Chinese characters. At some point in the future we will re-enable Chinese.
    – jmac
    Jul 29, 2015 at 4:07
  • @jmac is this status-by-design then?
    – Marc Gravell
    Jul 29, 2015 at 13:36
  • @MarcGravell currently yes, but will soon be [status-completed] at an indeterminate amount of time in the future.
    – jmac
    Jul 29, 2015 at 13:58
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    @MarcGravell, could you please consider adding linguistics.se to the sites where Chinese characters are allowed? Probably does not attract that much spam...
    – Alain Pannetier
    Aug 11, 2015 at 22:42
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    @jmac Travel.SE as well, please.
    – lambshaanxy
    Aug 14, 2015 at 1:25
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    @jpatokal - sorted for you.
    – Oded
    Aug 14, 2015 at 8:15
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    @Oded We regularly have questions and answers on English Language & Usage that need Unihan characters as well—can we have it back there as well, please?
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Aug 17, 2015 at 17:10
  • @JanusBahsJacquet ELU was one of the targets. Perhaps Unihan should be a rep-based privilege.
    – tchrist
    Aug 17, 2015 at 17:30
  • @tchrist That would work, I guess. 125 rep to use Arabic and Unihan (assuming the ban on Arabic is still in place at all; I haven't tested).
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Aug 17, 2015 at 17:32
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    @jmac presumably the spam posts are 100% Chinese, whereas legit posts would be 80%+ English with quoted Chinese characters. Couldn't you put in less obtrusive rules like, posts must be 50%+ non-Chinese characters, instead of banning Chinese characters completely?
    – user56reinstatemonica8
    Sep 2, 2015 at 12:35
  • @user568458 are you a spammer? Just kidding. :) I think this would almost be more confusing to users. 1 shorter and it's an invalid post doesn't make sense to me.
    – William
    Sep 5, 2015 at 14:13
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    @Oded: it seems you reenabled Chinese language on Travel, and now Travel is hit with lots of Chinese-language spam questions again. The pattern I've seen the last couple days is questions posted with tons of Chinese text and a bit of English which is the name of a well-known university (not the same one each time). I think we should revisit the enablement of Chinese on Travel, at least in titles or when it occupies over 50% of the question text. I translated (using Google) one of the spam posts, and it seems to be a service advertising fake US diplomas and gives a Tencent/QQ contact number.
    – John Zwinck
    Sep 22, 2015 at 1:01
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    @JohnZwinck - we don't have the tooling (at the moment) to do such blocking (based on % of Chinese characters in the post). There is work on progress to fix that. Currently - it is all or nothing.
    – Oded
    Sep 22, 2015 at 7:21
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    @Oded It'd be really nice if you put in some exception logic (minimum account age and reputation?) to make this less painful for users. I posted a workaround for posts, but I don't know of any way to work around the problem in comments. Right now it can be frustrating being unable to reply to users with banned characters in their names.
    – user215040
    Sep 27, 2015 at 9:03
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    @snailboat - Tim Post is looking into that.
    – Oded
    Sep 27, 2015 at 10:38

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