It took me half an hour to figure out why my answer was being blocked as spam and how to get past it.

Body cannot contains "`BreakIter". This looks like spam. And we don't like spam. Unless it's served with eggs and beans.

It turns out that it is nothing to do with the message. The reason is that it contained too many Chinese characters (which I was using sparingly to illustrate the multilingual capabilities of BreakIterator). I won't bore you with the details of how tedious it was to discover that and get some sort of workable answer. It was tedious.

It took me another half an hour to discover that I could override the block by starting the post with a blank line.

The spam block problem was reported previously on meta:

I'm requesting here that the message actually say what the real problem is.

Body cannot contain an excessive amount of non-English text.

That would have saved me a lot of time. Or if this sort of message is an intentional and effective deterrent, then at least allow users with some rep level to post "spam".

  • This is pretty clearly unintended behavior (both problems, including being able to bypass by adding a blank line) - re-tagging as a bug. – Tim Post Feb 14 '17 at 13:38
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    @TimPost, I recommend that you don't "fix" the blank line bypass unless you also provide another way to add more non-English characters. Before discovering that hack, I had to use screenshots of the code (which of course made it uncopyable). I imagine most spammers never make it to 200 rep, so there could be some sort of threshold like that where more non-English characters are allowed. – Suragch Feb 15 '17 at 0:32
  • This is touching on a long standing quirk that also made commenting on our Japanese SO a little frustrating, I've got it on our list of priority things for our developers to take a look at. I thought we actually fixed this some months ago but either it's a regression, or we didn't actually fix it. – Tim Post Feb 15 '17 at 9:32

The expression blocking these was a bit overzealous. I've simplified it to the point where it'll still block the spam coming in every night, but won't touch the vast majority of the posts containing Chinese/Hangul characters.

I also altered the message a bit:

Body cannot contain "".

  • Good to hear. I'm glad there was a middle ground. – Suragch Feb 24 '17 at 5:40
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    Body cannot contain the empty string? Well I guess we're all stuffed, then. – BoltClock Feb 24 '17 at 17:18

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