Korean characters not allowed

Question

For some reason posts or comments with some Korean characters inside aren't allowed. For example in this question it must be worked around using images How to search a Korean word made up of two or more syllables in Windows Explorer and if I edit this question Displaying Korean characters properly on a computer with English Windows XP I also get a message that says Body cannot contain "표준". When I commented with Korean characters I also get an error

I've seen this meta question Cannot ask question with Korean in it? but it's been too long ago. Shouldn't the ban be lifted off? One answer there says

The restriction on what characters are no longer allowed has been relaxed.

You should be able to post Korean characters now and the error message has been updated to be more helpful.

but I still can't use Korean characters in a post. If the spam still happens then at least count the ratio of Korean characters per post, because those spam posts contain all Korean characters

Answer 1

There was a second spam wave in October of 2019, so the ban was added back again. We can disable it again or we can try to make it smarter since these waves seems to happen more than once. I looked at the entry and this is what I'm seeing - the [\uAC00-\uD7AD]+ is part of the unicode range for Hangul.

Over the last 11 months there have been a bit over 300 hits on the block -

Based on this, it doesn't seem like there's a ton of attempts happening currently, so it's probably fine to drop it again. Confirm if this is what y'all would like and I'll get a dev to remove the block. If you have other thoughts, let me know.

I'll check back in a week unless someone pings me that it's more urgent and decided.

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Thanks to a reminder from JNat and some help from Yaakov, we've disabled the block, so you can now use Korean characters in posts again. I've also asked the mods to let us know if things get bad enough that we need to find another solution or we need to put the block back in place.

Answer 2

Catja's answer is effectively advocating that the block is outright removed and I wanted to simply garner Community opinion on whether that is the right course of action. To that end this is a counter-argument saying that the block should remain in place until such time as an effective permissive, yet still spam-blocking, alternative can be put in place.

Note: I am generally in favour of the removal of the block, as no language or person should feel that they are unwelcome here and in its current form the block is more of a hinderance than a help, but it needs to be done in a considered and deliberate fashion.

As such this answer is intended to play the devils-advocate.

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Those parties choosing to bombard our site with spam are an ever present background hum of activity on not only the Stack Exchange group of sites but the internet in general.

One of those groups are a set of Korean language spammers who are technologically savvy users who are able to evade conventional spam-fighting tactics such as user and IP blocks and several previous incarnations of regex based filtering (might have previously been removed and reinstated, but I do not know) as evidenced by the fact that attacks persist even when fed into the existing spam prevention system by both community members and moderators alike. This puts them above the more mundane spammers that frequent our site to advise us of their nice floral boutique shops never to be heard from again.

These attacks have happened before [1], [2] and we have tried to relax the system after some time only to be met with another influx.

Lacking a system that is flexible enough to meet the demands of the community I would argue that the current block, while heavy-handed, is necessary.

Unless the current block can be relaxed while simultaneously retaining a sufficiently strict edge to prevent future waves I do not see simply removing it as a solution.

The current regex based system may not allow sufficient flexibility to suit a large number of use cases. If it is not up to the task then perhaps a new system needs to be put in to use.

As a primarily English speaking site we already enforce rules that the majority of a post should be in the English language, but there will always be situations where users need to use their native alphabet to demonstrate a problem correctly and succinctly. We shouldn't be afraid of one set of bad actors

Such a system was requested in the past Meta SE: Enable a percent-based block of CJK characters on Travel so this isn't a particularly original request, but it is a request nontheless.

While I am willing to relax again, I would prefer that it be done with a goal in mind: at an absolute minimum it should be to finally give evidence of whether or not enhancement is needed to the current content filtering system. If the spam has subsided then nothing needs to be done, but if it happens again we need to know that something will be done going forwards.