I have been deleting the spam (looks to be of Asian origin) as @scruffy and @scottied has multiple times a day for a few months. I finally decided to alter the post code to prevent this. It seems to have worked. I did not see any last night or this morning. After a little glitch yesterday afternoon where I had made the filter too restrictive causing some real posts to not go through, I adjusted the filter to remedy it. The modification I made originally was only allowing ASCII characters to go through but it seems that Simple Press uses some Unicode characters in block quotes and mentions so I changed the filter to specifically stop posts with Unicode characters within the Asian character set.

While this action may be considered racist in that it specifically targets the Asian character set, I wish to keep this in place to prevent the constant barrage of daily spam. This is a modification and not an actual plugin so after any update to the main code base, I would have to re-add it to keep the spam out.

If I saw an IP from the spammers come up more than once, I would also ban that IP. This has led to our IP ban list growing very long. Since I think that the recent modification will stop the spammers, I am clearing the IP ban list. I have made a copy of the list incase we need to put it back.

Please let me know if this modification has unforeseen consequences like preventing you from posting something you normally could post in the past. I apologize for any problems that may have been encountered yesterday afternoon before I made the modification less restrictive.

This is going to be a tough one. The Korean multi character subset being used is exploiting a “feature” of the PHP UTF8 regex processing. https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=37391 . I am researching ways to catch it.