Unusual amount of fake (?) followers and fake links
-
This past month I’ve noticed a lot of new followers, all of which have one thing in common: when I click on “notifications” to see the followers, it shows their blog name, but their blog titles with the link to their blogs all say “site title”.
When I click on such a link, most of them get me to one and the same page for several followers, and it welcomes me to MY new site.
Has anyone experienced this as well? And is there anything that can be done about these strange (and I guess fake) followers.
I can’t tell what the intent of these links/follows is, but it seems iffy…
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
Hi @kikiorleans I had a similar occurrence some months back on my site and there wasn’t any real resolution of the issue at that time. However this thread is tagged for Staff, so hopefully they can let us know what is going on.
One thing you can do now that wasn’t possible back then is that you can remove iffy followers yourself. Instructions are on this page: https://en.support.wordpress.com/followers/
-
@justjennifer Thank you very much!! That link is really helpful, I must have missed that in my search.
-
You’re welcome! I’m going to leave this tagged for Staff to bring to their notice the recurring issue you mentioned.
-
Thanks! I’m in the middle of deleting, and I noticed that some followers can not be deleted, maybe that can be addressed as well.
-
Hi Kiki –
I’m happy to take a look at this for you. Can you share a few of the usernames that you are unable to remove as followers?
Thanks for the tag @justjennifer!
-
@staff-zinnia – I did a really dumb thing. After justjennifer sent me the link on how to remove followers I started removing. I’m really sorry about this.
I’m guessing the powers that be at WP cannot see who I removed, right? Or is there a way I can see them?The ones with the weird links have been popping up since mid-August, though, so I’m certain there will be more coming.
Should I just report back when another one pops up?
-
-
Oh darn! Sorry about that. :(
@staff-zinnia If it helps, I did find my original thread with this issue from Nov 2014. Since we didn’t have the option of removing followers back them, many of them are still subscribed. I just haven’t had the time to sit down and vet them or remove them.
-
@justjennifer No worries, it was my fault, I was so excited to learn about the remove button. I’m quite sure more of those strange links will pop up.
-
@Kiki – You can report them as spam or let us know when you have a suspicious new follower and we will take a look for you.
You could experiment with temporarily changing your site to Private to see if they continue or stop like @justjennifer mentioned here.
-
@staff-zinnia – Just noting that the odd subscriber behavior returned after I made my site Public again and continued for nearly a month from the first iffy subscriber and then *poof* simply vanished. Given the number of additional comments/reports in that thread, it seemed like something larger was going on.
-
@staff-zinnia – I looked through my followers again, and found 4 that all work the same way I described above: I click on their site link, it welcomes me to MY new site, and when I follow the link on the site it actually goes to MY account where my current sites are listed.
Should I post their blog links here? Or do I remember correctly that we shouldn’t do that?
-
Hi Kiki – I’ve sent an email to you. You can reply there with the usernames of the spammy followers. Usernames are not confidential, so it’s fine to post those here. Whichever you prefer. I’ll be able to take a closer look with that information.
- The topic ‘Unusual amount of fake (?) followers and fake links’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 