introducing the humble homoglyph
Jan. 22nd, 2026 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shyshyshilohshort little post this time! just wanted to go through how i go about making fic promo posts on twitter, etc., because of course one of the concerns in an age where rpf is gaining visibility (and not always of the sympathetic variety…) is the possibility for these posts to appear in search results. and this kind of thing is a two-way street! just as a non-rpfer doesn’t want to stumble upon my 20k toxic yuri when they’re looking for content of the irl members, i also don’t want them coming into my house where i am crazy 😭
so i’ve seen a couple different solutions to this. there’s the three-letter code shortening of member names (ex: jeon heejin / kim hyunjin -> jhj/khj), the substitution of numbers and/or special characters in place of certain letters (ex: haely -> ha3ly), and, especially in triples fandom, the use of member numbers instead of names (ex: kaede/dahyun -> 910).
these all have their pros and cons, but i personally prefer a variation of the substitution method using homoglyphs, which preserves human readability / visual appearance of the text without sacrificing the “protection” aspect. see, for example, the following strings:
String A: kotonien
String B: kоtоnіеn
unless you are particularly eagle-eyed, they appear very similar (especially depending on font). but then if you put them through a unicode detection tool such as this one, you get:
String A:
String B:
therefore String A is searchable where String B is not, because B uses homoglyph characters that are encoded completely differently from the letters that they appear to be. and there you have it — a neat little way of hiding in plain sight.
while you could theoretically substitute every single letter with a matching homoglyph, i usually just do vowels because that successfully prevents searchability while not being a gigantic pain in the ass. below is a little table of the regular vowel characters and their closest-matching homoglyphs (the lowercase “u” is still a little funky) (and again, if you really want all the rest of the letters, you can get them from here):
unfortunately the biggest caveat is that these homoglyph characters don’t play nice with screen readers. of course, not being computer-readable is kind of the whole point, for the purpose of not ending up in search results, but i do just want to make it clear that that comes at the cost of accessibility — but then again, so do a lot of other methods of “censoring” fic posts. and so of course i wish we lived in a world that was friendlier to visual disability just as i also wish we lived in a world where people weren’t so weird about rpf (thought of course the former is WAY more important let’s be so serious), but i want to put this out there as something to consider lest you think homoglyphs are like. a flawless solution lmao. happy posting!
so i’ve seen a couple different solutions to this. there’s the three-letter code shortening of member names (ex: jeon heejin / kim hyunjin -> jhj/khj), the substitution of numbers and/or special characters in place of certain letters (ex: haely -> ha3ly), and, especially in triples fandom, the use of member numbers instead of names (ex: kaede/dahyun -> 910).
these all have their pros and cons, but i personally prefer a variation of the substitution method using homoglyphs, which preserves human readability / visual appearance of the text without sacrificing the “protection” aspect. see, for example, the following strings:
String A: kotonien
String B: kоtоnіеn
unless you are particularly eagle-eyed, they appear very similar (especially depending on font). but then if you put them through a unicode detection tool such as this one, you get:
therefore String A is searchable where String B is not, because B uses homoglyph characters that are encoded completely differently from the letters that they appear to be. and there you have it — a neat little way of hiding in plain sight.
while you could theoretically substitute every single letter with a matching homoglyph, i usually just do vowels because that successfully prevents searchability while not being a gigantic pain in the ass. below is a little table of the regular vowel characters and their closest-matching homoglyphs (the lowercase “u” is still a little funky) (and again, if you really want all the rest of the letters, you can get them from here):
| Regular | Homoglyph | |
|---|---|---|
| A a | Α а | |
| E e | Е е | |
| I i | І і | |
| O o | Ο о | |
| U u | Ս υ |
unfortunately the biggest caveat is that these homoglyph characters don’t play nice with screen readers. of course, not being computer-readable is kind of the whole point, for the purpose of not ending up in search results, but i do just want to make it clear that that comes at the cost of accessibility — but then again, so do a lot of other methods of “censoring” fic posts. and so of course i wish we lived in a world that was friendlier to visual disability just as i also wish we lived in a world where people weren’t so weird about rpf (thought of course the former is WAY more important let’s be so serious), but i want to put this out there as something to consider lest you think homoglyphs are like. a flawless solution lmao. happy posting!
