Watched Words Improvement -- similar looking unicode characters

[markersocial]

For watched words, I think it could be improved if similar unicode characters also matched.

For example:
abcabcabc
𝘢𝘣𝘤𝘢𝘣𝘤𝘢𝘣𝘤
𝒂𝒃𝒄𝒂𝒃𝒄𝒂𝒃𝒄
ab𝘤𝘢𝘣𝒄𝒂𝒃𝒄

Essentially allows spammers to have a lot of variations of the same words to circumvent the word filter. I’ve been getting hammered by crafty motivated spammers so they’ve really been pushing Discourse’s anti-spam features to the absolute limit. This is one of the techniques they’re using.

Perhaps this could be useful: https://github.com/janlelis/unicode-confusable

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

That’s not “font” that is a different set of unicode characters.

[markersocial]

Ah my bad, thanks for the correction. Updated the post.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Unlikely, as that kind of unicode “looks like” matching is extremely expensive in CPU time and also very finicky to get right, because who decides what “looks like” something else?

I suggest you should consider other methods of dealing with these spammers.

In the meantime, just add common variations of spam terms as needed in different unicode characters.