Korean Spam Again!

[D.H.]

Can we just automatically censor any posting containing a Korean character?

[Goofproof]

Can we just automatically censor any posting containing a Korean character?

Is your record player broken again, tape a quarter to the arm. Jim

Why are you unable to read posts on the forum.

[Pugsy]

It's not Korean...it's Chinese...I ran it through 3 online translators the other day just to see what kind of crap it is.
It's Chinese
and no...it's not so easy as just filtering characters.

He's starting early tonight...I can stop it for a while but be prepared for a mess in the morning after I go to bed.

I blocked those 3 accounts but he will just create new accounts.

[Goofproof]

It's not Korean...it's Chinese...I ran it through 3 online translators the other day just to see what kind of crap it is.
It's Chinese
and no...it's not so easy as just filtering characters.

He's starting early tonight...I can stop it for a while but be prepared for a mess in the morning after I go to bed.

I blocked those 3 accounts but he will just create new accounts.

Good luck on getting D.H. to read that. Jim

[Pugsy]

Hey Sherlock...
how about taking the time to read the sticky here
viewtopic/t165262/Sticky-about-recent-s ... tacks.html

I am pretty sure that we don't need anyone pointing out the spam...we can all see it well enough.

[palerider]

Can we just automatically censor any posting containing a Korean character?

Is your record player broken again, tape a quarter to the arm. Jim

Why are you unable to read posts on the forum.

Reading requires the ability to comprehend...

Never seen any evidence of it from that one.

[chunkyfrog]

A mind is a terrible thing to lose . . .

[palerider]

A mind is a terrible thing to lose . . .

"lose" implies having had something in the first place.... still no evidence of that.

[chunkyfrog]

Oh, my bad.

[RaveledSleave]

It's not Korean. I realise no-one actually cares, but it's driving me a little nuts! And it's so odd to me to have people insisting it's specifically Korean. The languages are actually very easy to tell apart even if you don't speak them.

So here is a primer on East Asian languages that no-one asked for, using the sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". (Using Google Translate, so I make no promises about its grammatical accuracy, but my Korean and Chinese knowledge is no longer up to the task of translating it myself.)

Simplified Chinese (Mandarin):
敏捷的棕色狐狸跳过了懒狗
The characters (hànzì) are relatively square, made up of lots of fine straight lines - they look "detailed". Each character represents a whole word or concept. Chinese is not an inflected language, i.e. you don't have to change the endings of any of the verbs, so it can be written entirely in these characters.

Korean
빠른 갈색 여우는 게으른 개를 뛰어 넘습니다.
The characters (hangul) are still fairly square, but much simpler, and make use of circles in a way that's not seen in hànzì. Unlike in Chinese, each character represents a syllable sound, not a word or whole concept.

Japanese
クイックブラウンキツネは怠惰な犬の上を飛ぶ
Japanese uses some Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese) to represent some words, but because it's an inflected language (i.e. the verbs change their endings depending on what you're doing with them) it also uses its own syllable systems, hiragana and katakana. The above sentence has examples of katakana (simple, spiky ones), hiragana (simple, curvy ones) and kanji (complex and detailed like in Chinese).

Source: my degree in Oriental Studies + fact checking on wiki just now. I primarily studied Japanese but we covered Chinese and Korean as well.

Incidentally, if anyone's wondering what the spam is actually about, it's super weird. Each post is basically just a standard review of the university mentioned in English in the title. Stuff like "The University of Toronto is famous for x, y, z and has a campus culture that encourages student interaction" or whatever. It's bland, as far as I can see it's accurate, and there are no links or attempts to get the reader to click on anything or do anything - there's literally nothing in the posts except basic prospectus-style info on the universities. I have no idea what the point of it is. Given the range of universities mentioned it seems unlikely it's an ad campaign gone wrong. I really don't know what the spammers are hoping to gain, apart from possibly informing some Chinese speakers of how nice the campus is or what subjects they can study, which doesn't seem like it's something you'd need spam to achieve...

[jnk...]

It's not Korean.

Few in the West can tell Hanja/Hanmun from Chinese.

This isn't about language or surface content, anyway, is it? I believe it to be an example of the lowest form of the medium itself being the message.

The primary message, roughly translated into Old English, is "thou shalt be disrupted," no matter what imitation pseudo-content is being used.

[jsielke]

Can we just automatically censor any posting containing a Korean character?

Is your record player broken again, tape a quarter to the arm. Jim

Why are you unable to read posts on the forum.

Another rude, condescending type. I am starting to miss xxyzx.

[RaveledSleave]

Few in the West can tell Hanja/Hanmun from Chinese.

I know, and honestly I wouldn’t really expect anyone to recognise the difference off the top of their head. I’m just confused as to why these one or two people keep insisting it’s Korean, even after being told it’s Chinese. If anything, I would expect most people to default to assuming Chinese when seeing a character based language.

[chunkyfrog]

I am just grateful that it's gone by the time I am online.
Thanks to Pugsy and Ben.

[Goofproof]

Can we just automatically censor any posting containing a Korean character?

Is your record player broken again, tape a quarter to the arm. Jim

Why are you unable to read posts on the forum.

Another rude, condescending type. I am starting to miss xxyzx.

Thanks, You can always count on me to give you the facts, even if you can't handle them. Jim