Community maintainers should be able to disallow Cyrillic posts

[ron_newman]

Title
Community maintainers should be able to disallow Cyrillic posts

Short, concise description of the idea
The maintainers of a community should be given a checkbox option that would prohibit Cyrillic-alphabet posts in the community. This would go a long way toward ending the spam problem in English-language LJ communities

Full description of the

Comments

[lady_angelina]

I say no, because this smacks of discrimination against people who use the Cyrillic alphabet. If you disallow Cyrillic, then you might as well disallow other alphabets, like Arabic, Greek, Japanese, etc.

Besides, there are legitimate posts from Cyrillic users. I'd hate to think that someone's post got disallowed just because it was in a certain alphabet. The majority of the spam I've seen has been in English, anyway, so this wouldn't solve the problem of spam.

[fiddlingfrog]

You'd also have to disallow posts in Latin characters, for those communities that don't want English.

[lady_angelina]

That too. ;)

The thing is, I'm afraid that if this suggestion were implemented, it could set a dangerous precedent for the ability to discriminate against certain groups of people on LiveJournal, just because said groups are perceived to be a larger source of spam or other unwanted posts. =/

Besides, if you disallow Cyrillic, no problem for the spammers who use the Cyrillic alphabet to just go to Babelfish and pipe their ads in there for an equivalent in a Latin alphabet! And most of the spam I've seen is in English and/or consists of links or images only.

[silverflight8]

The thing is, I'm afraid that if this suggestion were implemented, it could set a dangerous precedent for the ability to discriminate against certain groups of people on LiveJournal, just because said groups are perceived to be a larger source of spam or other unwanted posts.

Pretty much this.

[lady_angelina]

Yeah. =( And on that note, I wonder if something like this suggestion might not even be in violation of LJ's TOS, although that's up to the Abuse Prevention Team or LJ staff to weigh in on.

[ron_newman]

Well, hopefully I'm not in violation of the TOS just for making the suggestion ;-) Someone had to approve it into this moderated community, after all.

[lady_angelina]

Ahh, no, not for making the suggestion per se. Sorry for the confusion here! I meant, what you're proposing might be in violation of the TOS, if LJ's policies prevent LJ from promoting implementations that could discriminate against protected classes. But again, that's for the Abuse Prevention Team and the LJ staff to weigh in on this.

The thing is, something like this would make discrimination against users of the Cyrillic alphabet part of LJ's code base and infrastructure. Basically, you're asking LJ to abet you in discriminating against those folks, whereas if you moderated membership in your community to allow only users you don't believe are spammers, that's your choice alone and not implicitly endorsed by LJ. If this makes any sense.

[ron_newman]

I understand. The busy community I co-maintain, surprisingly, hasn't been hit by Russian spam. But I'm seeing it all over my friends list, especially in low-traffic communities.

[jai_dit]

Well, that's an overly simplistic take on it, given how many languages use Latin-1. (And let's not ignore the history of the Internet. Being developed in English-speaking countries, many languages usually written in other scripts are also sometimes transcribed into ASCII approximations due to technological limitations. Less of an issue these days with Unicode for sure, but still out there.)

[cos]

This objection doesn't make sense to me. Community moderators know whether Cyrillic is appropriate for their community. Vast numbers of English-language communities exist where it is never appropriate to post a majority-Cyrillic post. "there are legitimate posts from Cyrillic users" is a smokescreen - we're talking about communities where, if a post is legitimate, regardless of which user it may be from, the post by definition must be in an alphabet legible to the community's readership, which is not Cyrillic.

Now, this doesn't mean I'm necessarily in favor of the idea, or the reasons given. But your objection is way off target.

P.S. Like the OP, I took have seen large numbers of spam posts in Cyrillic, and none in Arabic or Japanese or other scripts.

[lady_angelina]

Please see this comment, where I said that the reason for my objection here is because it's basically asking LJ to endorse discrimination based on language, which could set a dangerous precedent of implementing other features or options that could be exclusionary towards groups of people from protected classes.

Now, if a maintainer wants to set membership of their community to moderated (meaning, someone would have to request membership, and the maintainer has to approve or reject it), then it would be completely the maintainer's responsibility to do that. If the maintainer wants to deny membership on the basis of the alphabet that a user posts in, that would be entirely the maintainer's choice, not LJ's. But implementing an option that disallows ALL posts from a certain language/alphabet would imply that LJ endorses this kind of discrimination against certain users, whether or not the maintainer uses that option.

On the other hand, I think azurelunatic has a more sensible and less exclusionary alternative for what the OP of this post is

[ron_newman]

Yes, I think that would be a totally reasonable response from the maintainer of a Russian-language community being invaded by Latin-alphabet spammers.

I do like azurelunatic's suggestion as well as others that have been posted here. I hope this has started a useful discussion and that something reasonable and implementable can emerge from it.

[azurelunatic]

And my suggestion could, as written, do essentially the same thing -- all one would have to do is enter the Cyrillic alphabet as a criterion making the entry require moderation: either character by character, or with a regular expression. Though from my experience, 'shoes', 'handbags', 'prescription', and 'viagra' tend to not be said more than five times in a legitimate entry.

[lady_angelina]

Though from my experience, 'shoes', 'handbags', 'prescription', and 'viagra' tend to not be said more than five times in a legitimate entry.

OBJECTION!

Copyright issues notwithstanding Someone who wanted to quote or parody Kelly's "Shoes" song in an entry might trip the spam alert on that basis alone. XD