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.

[danceinacircle]

Huge definite no because the idea is xenophobic at it's core, and because the LJ Abuse team WANTS those reports. If no one reports the spammers, the spammers never go away.

[jai_dit]

If the spammers can't post, they also go away. There have been several antispam techniques implemented on LiveJournal itself to effect this. FYI.

[silverflight8]

I sympathize with you about the spam, I really do, but I have to agree with lady_angelina and danceinacircle - the underlying idea is discriminatory and I don't like the idea that LJ must be split between "the Russians" and the English-speaking portion.

[fiddlingfrog]

I agree. My favorite community on LJ, retro_futurism, is a great mix of Russian and English speakers and I'd be quite bummed if the mods there decided to automatically deny posts in English for any reason.

[ron_newman]

And the maintainer of such a community, recognizing that it is mixed-language, would not enable this option.

[fiddlingfrog]

You sure about that? What if one of the maintainers had a bout of nationalism and decided to enforce a "Russian only" policy?

[silverflight8]

Sure. They can delete posts that are offtopic and impose any rules they like on the comm as long as it doesn't violate the ToS; LJ doesn't control communities.

[fiddlingfrog]

Because this suggestion is an automated "Go away, we don't want you here" and deleting a post after the fact is a person saying "You're not following our rules, please conform to our standards."

[ron_newman]

Just to clarify -- I'm suggesting making this an option for community maintainers and most definitely not a default setting.

In geographically-based communities such as the numerous Boston-area comms, all useful posts are in English, and anything posted in a non-Latin alphabet would be useless to readers even in the rare case that it is not spam.

I don't see any significant spam in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc. so that's why I focussed specifically on Cyrillic.

[silverflight8]

You might want to edit your post to include this info...not everyone reads all the comments before commenting.