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]

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 trying to achieve. Yes, filtering on certain spam-related phrases isn't foolproof and could nail legitimate posts while letting actual spam slip under the radar, but at least it wouldn't discriminate against any users based on language, and it would just put the flagged posts in the moderation queue instead of outright rejecting or deleting them.

I also think the reason that you might have seen more spam posts in Cyrillic languages and almost none in other languages is simply because a larger proportion of LJ's userbase is from Russia or other countries that use the Cyrillic alphabet. When I used to work as a Support volunteer, the vast majority of non-English Support requests I saw were in Russian or Ukrainian, and very few of them were in other languages.

In any case, I don't think it would be fair to the non-spamming majority of Cyrillic users to implement an option to disallow their posts just because a relative few of them posted spam entries. Yes, I've seen such spam posts in Cyrillic, too, but the majority of spam entries I've seen on LJ were in English. So let me ask you this: If it were possible for maintainers of non-English LJ communities to automatically disallow posts that were in English just because the majority of spam they got happened to be in English, would you find that acceptable?

[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