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The question Followup to "How does one type Chinese in LaTeX?" raises an interesting problem. If one tries to paste the code by Leo Liu in this answer, pop up boxes saying

Body cannot contain "??".

Quack

where in place of ?? the first used Chinese character appears.

Trying to add Chinese characters in comments results in

Comments cannot contain that content.

Quack

The first Chinese character is U+6587, which, according to Google Translate, means “culture”, so it doesn't seem to bear offensive or disputable meaning. If I remove it, the second character triggers similar messages. Again according to Google Translate, the sequence

U+6587 U+7AE0 U+5185 U+5BB9

simply means “Article content”.

I can paste the characters in the code examples in other program windows; the same if I try copying and pasting the characters in the resulting PDF file.

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

We have has a spate of Chinese spam across the network - quite persistent too.

As result we have taken the temporary measure of disallowing all Chinese characters across the network (barring the few sites where they are expected - Chinese language, Japanese language as well and Anime & Manga, for example).

We will remove the block once we see the spam attempts stop.

The last recorded attempt was ~24 hours ago.

The block has been hit once again, two days ago. Looking at what has been blocked, most were legitimate posts.

So, I've lifted the block.

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  • Was there an announcement somewhere?
    – egreg
    Aug 7, 2015 at 9:22
  • Not that I am aware of. We manage spam block continually. We also don't want to tip spammers to what we do.
    – Oded
    Aug 7, 2015 at 9:25
  • It's quite annoying not being able to type in legitimate posts for unknown reasons, even if those reasons are good.
    – egreg
    Aug 7, 2015 at 9:28
  • 2
    I appreciate that - it is annoying, but we do not currently have a better way to block these Chinese spammers. The decision was taken to block them on sites that have little reason to legitimately use Chinese characters.
    – Oded
    Aug 7, 2015 at 9:37
  • 1
    Could we, please, trigger the spam filter only for low-rep users?
    – yo'
    Aug 7, 2015 at 12:38
  • @yo' - that is not functionality we currently have. I am not sure that this would be the right approach either.
    – Oded
    Aug 7, 2015 at 13:44
  • 1
    @Oded Do you experience spam floods from users with 400+k reputation?! I understand that "not implemented" is a reason, but I don't see what's wrong with the approach. After all, wasn't image uploading and linking limited in the same way some not so long time ago?
    – yo'
    Aug 7, 2015 at 13:52
  • @yo' - just saying that there may be better approaches. Tim Post is looking into better anti-spam tools.
    – Oded
    Aug 7, 2015 at 13:55
  • @Oded, could the linguistics.se site also benefit from the special regime, I had to make a bitmap to workaround the issue? Thanks.
    – Alain Pannetier
    Aug 11, 2015 at 22:19
  • 1
    @AlainPannetier - I removed the block on linguistics. It was only hit twice ever. Probably both times were you. You should be able to replace the image now.
    – Oded
    Aug 12, 2015 at 8:51
  • Please see my comment in the code block. How to insert Chinese characters in the following template?
    – Johannes_B
    Aug 12, 2015 at 12:02
  • Is the block on Chinese text on again? I cannot post a source file with a paragraph of Chinese text in it.
    – zzjing
    Jan 11, 2016 at 6:33
  • @zzjing - yes, looks like it was reinstated early November and was triggered 50 times since (which includes your attempt)
    – Oded
    Jan 11, 2016 at 9:27
  • @zzjing - I looked at our logs, and pretty much all 50 are legitimate uses, so I removed the block.
    – Oded
    Jan 11, 2016 at 9:30

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