Goodbye Chinese spam!

In trying to get rid of spam on Chainki, an important part of the battle is to try and ensure that it does not come back again. And ideally this should be done automatically. Even with a spam filter, if you see that a particular site, like xyz.com is adding spam and you block all entries by that site, it's possible that next day another site, abcdefg.com will spam. A lifetime job to add all the possible spammers!

But I've just clicked one neat way to get rid of Chinese spam - block individual Chinese characters! As parts of the site, such as the French Chainki are not allowed anything but French links (and generally French descriptions), it is clearly spam whenever anybody tries to enter Chinese characters into an edit.

Soooo...I have started to add simply random Chinese characters to the spam filter! The funny thing is that I have absolutely no idea what any of the characters I am banning mean, but it is (I think) likely to be highly effective in stopping Chinese spam. Here is a list of characters I have banned so far, all of which have been copy-pasted completely at random from Chinese spam text I have found on my site (apologies if any of these are swear words!!):

• 雅
  
• 思
  
• 培
  
• 另
  
• 天
  
• 可
  
• 来
  
• 不
  
• 关
  
• 个
  
• 出
  
• 司
  
• 中
  

One of the great problems in dealing with spam is that you want to eliminate all the spam of the bad guys easily, without causing any problems to the good guys. This technique I think - or I hope - will eliminate very quickly all the Chinese spam!

Chinese spam? - Bring it on!