Thread:Tokina8937/@comment-31840120-20201104184247/@comment-9136029-20201104185444

(Finally a message that doesn't bug out!!!!! :D)

OK to explain you the whole thing, since yesterday noon I'm leading an experiment against both a global troll and Pakistanese money spammers. Both are using invisible characters to evade filters. The experiment is composed of about a dozen of Phalanx filters, each of them containing a single invisible character. Over all of these filters, some got deactivated because too many FPs, one was even horribly poisonous (= way too many FPs within few mins), some other are still online. Two filters even caught spam bots! oO

The issue when these filters are online is that, the concerned user who tried to edit the concerned page hit many, many times the concerned filter. In order to unlock the concerned user, I had to remove the char and I tagged the edit as "not undoable", it just means this is a repair against Phalanx, so the user can then edit the page. (= when filter is online, trying to undo a such change will result the person trying to undo the edit being blocked by the anti-spam filter)

Most of the invisible characters are easily noticeable in the UCP source editor and are displayed by little red middots (these are dots being aligned in the middle of the current line, ref also middot when you code on wikis). It's not the case for all of them since I have one that revealed itself to be invisible even in this editor, but most of the concerned characters can be noticed thanks to that.

Other than this, it is possible to use a converter from Unicode to HTML to see where the characters are. And take the concerned space into this converter to see "which one it is". I use this for the case of the special character still invisible in UCP source editor or when I'm on a non-UCP wiki.

Repairing a Phalanx issue, especially when users are not used to report FPs (and in this case, I have the filters under hand on a personal sheet so I often check them and I log EVERYTHING that can happen!) it goes above local laws, it's considered as an extreme emergency case. It happens to some of us when users are complaining about FPs for filters we can't deactivate (abused URL shorteners are a typical example) to intervene and fix the issue within the page. After yeah, for the case of the invisible character, I got users telling me "I can't see what is blocking", and yeah, it's because an invisible character, so you would have to select the whole line, set it into a software that can "play" with encodings and it would reveal what was the issue.

Hope this helps :)