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

[fiddlingfrog]

On a technical note, how much of a post would have to use Cyrillic characters to be blocked? If I wrote "And throughout the square I heard cries of 'С Новым годом!' rising over the shouts and the music." would that be blocked, or would the entire post need to be in Cyrillic to qualify?

[ron_newman]

A good point, which is why 'require CAPTCHA for non-preferred character set' may be preferable to the solution that I proposed originally here. We already have 'require CAPTCHA for non-whitelisted links'.

[fiddlingfrog]

Maybe a better solution all around would be a more robust set of captcha testing, comment screening, and post moderating options

[fiddlingfrog]

Just as an example of how the current tools work, I inherited maintainership of a community a few months ago after I complained about some spam we were getting. It was just images and links for German porn sites, no other text. Once I switched the community to only allowing white-listed links to go unmoderated the spam stopped immediately. I never even saw an attempt at putting one of those posts in the moderation queue.

[ron_newman]

How did you decide what links go on the whitelist?

In my (geographically-based) community, people legitimately post links to all sorts of external stuff -- restaurants, retail stores, other blogging sites, newspaper and magazine articles, Wikipedia, Yelp, Chowhound, you name it.

If I had to personally moderate all of this activity, it would be overwhelming and I'd have to step down as a maintainer. It would also very much disrupt the free flow of commenting activity.

[fiddlingfrog]

The list is pre-populated with several dozen popular and legitimate sites to start. And I believe you can find whitelists used by other services elsewhere online. You could probably even marshal your community to providing the seeds of a good custom whitelist by asking them to comment to an entry with sites they feel are useful and legitimate. Get a good list before you start, and then ask moderators to comment with the domain used in entries that they approve, and periodically add that to the whitelist.

Edit: Oh yes, and the whitelist currently only effects entries and not comments. Again, some toggles as to which links to allow or not would be good.

-1

[koulagirl666]

I don't see how this could be implemented

[charliemc]

Wow! Fascinating discussion on this suggestion!

I've seen loads of SPAM, but though there's a lot of Cyrillic SPAM currently, most of what I've seen over years here has been English...

I agree that each community should be able to set rules and enforce them. But I also agree that this suggestion unfairly targets Russians (and other users of the Cyrillic alphabet)...

I can see potential benefits in being able to filter out entries based on languages, but suspect that's still a major amount of work to achieve. (I can't speak to it, being unfamiliar with what sort of coding it would require.)

At this point in time, I'll agree with the majority and say no. I get what you'd like to accomplish, SPAM-wise, but this doesn't seem like a good way to get there...

-1

[justhuman]

It's a discriminatory policy that creates a barrier to communication.

I belong to plenty of primarily English communities that have posters that have another language as their primary. While many of these posters have better command of English than native speakers, many are in the process of learning English and are using their shared community interest to expand their skills while broadening their LJ experience.

I also find that when someone is struggling with the right words in English in these comms that other comm members regardless of language step up and help them make their request or statement. This is part of what building community is about.

Re: -1

[cos]

> I belong to plenty of primarily English communities that have posters that have another language as their primary

Re: -1

[justhuman]

You missed the point of my reply

Re: -1

[silverflight8]

The existence of such a tool - we don't want your type here - is another problem. What does it say to users when there's specific tools for filtering you out? Once it becomes a coded-in feature, it becomes part of what LiveJournal is, whereas a maintainer removing posts arbitrarily is just about the maintainer.