Weird followers
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In the last hour and a half I’ve had six new ‘people’ signing up to follow my blog. All with very long names at outlook.com like acedopjsandrail and rosellfiwjacquelineysd – not exactly normal. Anyone know what is going on?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I literally pulled up the forum to say the same thing! Within the past few hours I got five followers from Outlook emails- plazanowluisvly@outlook and others like that. Mine is odysseynerds.wordpress.com.
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Please see https://en.support.wordpress.com/followers/
How to Remove a Follower https://en.support.wordpress.com/followers/#how-to-remove-a-follower -
Thanks! Strange that people would spam follow. What’s the point in that, besides being annoying?
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They may be trying to get you to follow back. Some people actually follow back without checking out the sites in question.
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Two thoughts…..
Need a way to search the followers and/or sort.
Need a way to block the followers if suspicious so they don’t follow you again. -
@ebraiter Please read the links that @timethief has provided for information on removing unwanted followers.
Do know however that on a publicly visible site, it is not possible to block someone from following you. You can none-the-less report the user as spam on Gravatar by following the link to their Gravatar profile and using the “report abuse” link in the left column. If you don’t see the link there, you may need to log in to Gravatar as well.
Regardless, I’ve tagged this thread for Staff attention to as to inform them of this issue.
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Glad it’s not just me. I appreciate that anyone can follow any blog but I don’t want an email sent to them from me with every blog post. Thank you timethief for the links. They seem to have stopped now at 9, did think I might wake up to hundreds of them :)
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Exactly the same here. All of them email followers, all of them outlook.com and all of them suspicious looking names. I can’t think of a security weakness from this – but going to remove them as followers.
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Mine were in the e-mail section. Which also means that there is no report as spam button or anything like that.
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Many thanks for this thread. I also had 6 new outlook.com followers with long, comment-spammer type email addresses in the past 24 hours. I’ve seen this before on my self-hosted WordPress sites, but not on WordPress.com. Hope WordPress.com is monitoring this thread, as it seems likely they are up to no good. Thanks, timethief, for links on how to remove them, and justjennifer, for flagging the issue.
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This happens from time to time and spammers try new tricks. Eventually our anti-spam forces figure out their tricks and defeat them.
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I’ve just discovered the same thing. Noticed my follower numbers had jumped up and they were all in my email followers list. Odd looking email addresses, all yesterday and today, about 6 or 7 of them, just removed them and will do the same if any more appear.
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I am having the same issue and figured it was spam, but wanted to make sure there is something I need to do or not do about it. I want to be able to continue to trust WordPress notifications as I already do.
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I got one more today on my second blog. Removed it. Interesting to note that my second blog gets almost no traffic because I barely post.
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I’ve received twelve e-mail followers in the last 24 hours or so, all with (email visible only to moderators and staff).
I suspect it may be a method of detecting new posts to enable their spam comments to be sent more efficiently.
Obviously I don’t want to delete genuine followers and like others above, I would be interested to know whether WordPress has any official comment and what other users are suggesting.
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