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Some of the spammers are posting questions that have a hindi title, a hindi body, and some phone numbers in them. They then self-answer and/or comment with more hindi + phone number spam.

Proposal: Ban all hindi characters in titles, comments and post bodies. It's very rare for hindi characters to be needed in a proper/non-spam question/body/comment.

Also, stuff like Allow 100% accurate autonuking for spam and Now that we have up to 1000 flags, can SE please finally reduce the 5-second rate limit on flagging posts and comments? might be a good idea to combat spam.

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    Considering all questions on Super User should be in English the necessity of non-English characters are non-existent in my opinion. Commented Aug 14, 2025 at 2:28
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    @Ramhound Usernames in Windows can use non-Latin letters. This can have interesting outcomes in some cases - cases that are exactly up the alley of this site to deal with. Or they might be asking about directory paths with non-Latin characters in them. There are surely plenty of questions that can use non-Latin symbols yet be on-topic, e.g., keyboard layout questions, questions dealing with the culture in the OS, and others. I'd find banning Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, etc. an extreme overstepping. Commented Aug 14, 2025 at 5:39
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    Maybe banning stuff with an excess of non-latin/hindi stuff is possible Commented Aug 14, 2025 at 5:40
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    Already caught by Charcoal. Commented Aug 14, 2025 at 5:41
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    We want to stop them posting it, not just remove it quickly. Commented Aug 14, 2025 at 5:42
  • Related: Blacklisting "Expedia". Commented Aug 14, 2025 at 6:56
  • @VLAZ - I was speaking specifically of the question title and question body and answer body. Commented Aug 14, 2025 at 12:45
  • @DavidPostill - It’s caught….slowly. Commented Aug 14, 2025 at 12:45
  • @Ramhound The question title and body are the field somebody would add information about what Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, etc. characters they have problem with while operating their computer. And the answer body can contain somebody using the same characters with an explanation how to deal with them. Commented Aug 14, 2025 at 13:50
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    Note that there's already a precedent to block CJK characters due to spam: Under what conditions are 漢字 blocked?, and it was very confusing for users who have legit problems. Commented Aug 15, 2025 at 3:18
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    Another idea to combat spam: Allow users to flag multiple questions at once as spam Commented Aug 16, 2025 at 19:13
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    I personally think unregistered users or users less than a few days old should be able to submit answers to their own questions. I have yet to see a new user, submit a high quality question, and end up also submitting an answer to their own question after 15 years. Commented Aug 26, 2025 at 3:26
  • @Ramhound did you mean "should not" or "should"? Commented Aug 26, 2025 at 3:28
  • Obviously “should not” Commented Aug 26, 2025 at 4:18
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    Marking this deferred same as this request. Will review again once the upcoming anti-spam tooling has been live for a while. That said, my opinion is similar to Giacomo's- this will likely have little long-term impact on spam, while being almost guaranteed to alienate legitimate users. Commented Oct 2, 2025 at 21:05

2 Answers 2

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No.

I cannot speak for Stack Exchange, but I can speak for myself and banning only Hindi characters won’t make a significant impact on spam at best. At worst it will alienate legitimate posters.

Okay, so you saw one piece of spam (I believe this one) where the title was written in Hindi. That is just one piece of spam among dozens — if not hundreds — of pieces of spam.

Simply using Hindi characters as a determining factor will not stop the floods of spam when the spam arrives. At worst, it will alienate legitimate questions from Hindi native speakers who post in English with Hindi text as example.

If you were to do that the question would be, “Well, what about other non-English characters? Should posts with these characters be banned?” And they shouldn’t.

The same logic holds for Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters. Some could legitimately in good faith post a question along the lines of “Why won’t a filename like こんにちは work on Windows 11?”

I don’t know if that is a particularly good example of a question, but the general idea stays the same: If someone posts in English with non-English characters that runs the risk of alienating a legitimate posters for the “benefit” of maybe flagging some random spam post.

To quote Blackstone’s ratio:

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Which can be adjusted to Stack Exchange as:

“It is better that ten spammy posters escape than that one legitimate poster suffer.”

I mean, I would be shocked if much of what passes for spam would somehow sneak past us 10 times, but you get the idea.

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    Well, we could say that anything with an "excess" of Hindi will not be allowed. An excess means stuff like post and title mostly hindi, with few non-Hindi. Many spammers had a lot of excess-Hindi posts. This is just my suggestion though. Commented Aug 15, 2025 at 1:27
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    @Lucenaposition I don't think the "many spammers" are actually that many. I mean proportionally from the spam we get even when we narrow down to the same source (the support number spammers), I am pretty sure the posts in Hindi are a minority. I'll try to come up with some better stats but from what I've seen - while they show up frequently it's a few a day, compared to the ~200 spam posts per day the site gets on average. If the number of posts blocked is 10-15, that is not a significant impact. Moreover, the spammers would likely just substitute the spam in Hindi with spam in English. Commented Aug 15, 2025 at 4:23
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    @Lucenaposition I'll need more time to give better data but at first count, there were 275 reports yesterday (2025-08-14) and of those 27 had Hindi characters in the titles. This should include both questions and answers (the data I'm looking at lists a title even for answers, taking it from the parent post). I'll try to grab more stats but I'd need more time to examine the data. However, if the stats for one day are representative, we're talking about a measure against 10% of all spam. Commented Aug 15, 2025 at 6:11
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    I have been a member of Super User for over a decade and have answered hundreds of questions, and reviewed tens of thousands of questions, and I can’t think of a single time where a legitimate question or answer were required to contain Hindi characters. The same is true for Chinese and Japanese characters but we’re not receiving dozens of spam messages nightly containing those languages Commented Aug 15, 2025 at 23:44
  • I would just be happy with a month long ban of “customer” and “credit” in the question body and title. I also would like to see a temporary ban of unregistered users being able to submit a question and answer within a 5 minute timeframe. It also would be nice to see automated spam flags, if a question is flagged as spam, and have the answer automatically be flagged as spam when it’s the same user. Commented Aug 16, 2025 at 2:38
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We get a lot of hindi spam and historically we had a block on CJK scripts - its been done before. And practically, it would be nice to have them react to us, rather than. I think its worth considering, so I'll be throwing this a status-review tag

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  • yes, here it is Commented Dec 14, 2025 at 11:08
  • In theory, the new spam filters should handle this without a blanket block. We'll see when our spammers decide to show up. Commented Dec 14, 2025 at 11:11

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