Chinese Characters in Chat?

[Bastian]

Playing HL2DM I find that some players, who otherwise chat in normal latin characters, sometimes write a lot of chinese (or korean?) characters in the chat, which turn up and vanish so fast they are hard to read. These chinese chatmessages do not display in the console either. The whole thing bothers me, because when the chinese chat displays I get a minor lagspike.
I have attached a screenshot from one of those chinese chatmessages.

Question:
1) What is this?
2) How can I stop the game from displaying them/cut the lag?

 

[naisanza]

never seen that before. but looks like a nice trick to make people lag

 

[crazyelmo]

Um, that seems to happen for me when I lag a little, people's old text changes and fades out quickly, probably just a bug.

 

[bigdorkarama]

I've heard (over at the STEAM forums) that it has something to do with people who use stuff from the Windows Character Map (Arabic and Asian letters and whatnot) in their username. That explanation seems right to me, and the last time I saw this junk it was indeed because some dork with a wacky name had just logged on. Retards, eh?

Oh, and I just realized that you can see a guy with strange characters in his name in the chat just above it. :-D