A possible bot?
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I have a follower who appears to be a bot, which I’m trying to prevent from following my blog. There is never any traffic associated with her, and the follows come in any time, day or night. I’ve repeatedly deleted this blogger, but she comes back. Her gravatar on WordPress isn’t associated with any blog, but when I searched online, I found that she lists ‘myhealthmatterstoday.info’ on her gravatar page.
You can find her here:
https://en.gravatar.com/debbysmith411The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi –
It’s not possible to control who is viewing your site. That’s just the nature of the internet.
You can hide your site and make it private. Or place the content behind a password filter. Those are both options and we can provide more instructions if they are of interest.
Their blog is regularly updated and active. If you’d like to reach them directly there’s a contact page at http://myhealthmatterstoday.info/contact/
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I just found it interesting that no footprint of their visit is ever counted, either by WordPress or by Statcounter. I remember back around 2013/14 there was a rash of bot followers that WP seemed to be able to clear up. There are a few ‘bloggers’ who do this. I don’t know if they key in on tags or categories, but they follow, sometimes 3 or 4 times a day, but don’t have any other activity.
Thanks for you help.
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Hi there,
There’s no way to tell if a specific user is viewing your site, therefore, I don’t know where are getting this data.
Bottom line is that they don’t seem to be a bot as they have an active website and as staff-zinnia already said, you cannot ban selected people from viewing your public site.
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I had encountered this issue before, as can be read here:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/bot-followers-2/#post-3150523
And the response regarding ysweightloss – who was doing the same thing. BTW, he’s back again, under a different username.
Here’s the quote from one of your staff from my prior experience:
“Hi there,
Thanks for the additional details, with that information we were able to determine that the account was being used to generate follower spam and blocked the user.”
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Hi there,
In that case the specific account had a pattern of abusive behaviour across multiple sites it was following. One person repeatedly following your site when you remove them does not equal a pattern of abuse. All it indicates is that they really want to follow your site.
Their profile not linking to any site is also not against any rule.
My advice is to stop removing them from your site and just ignore them. For all that you know they’re a genuine reader who enjoys reading your content.
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Sorry to be a pest, but this happened today. As you can probably tell, I have this aversion to commercial bloggers. As I deleted one follower, another came in, deleted that one and another came in:
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I can’t tell whether that’s one person who really wanted to follow your site, and tried different accounts after the first was removed, or whether it’s a spammer. It does look like the latter but it’s hard to tell since you’re removing them right away on your end.
Would you be willing to try something? The next time a suspected spam follower comes in, let us know here, but do not remove them as a follower until we’ve had a chance to watch their account for a bit.
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Ok, several have followed me and i havent deleted them yet. I’ll wait for your response before I delete them.
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BTW, I suspected that the person doing this tagged one of my posts:
https://forfriendswithoutborders.wordpress.com/2019/04/20/close-encounters/
4 mortgage lender gravatars liked that post, and 3 followed me. I made the post private overnight, and didn’t get any of them back. I then made it public again and they appeared shortly thereafter.
Right now, 3 have followed – all mortgage lenders:
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@forfriendswithoutborders, thank you. Would you be willing to leave them for a while — as in a few weeks? Unless you’re publicly displaying a follower list on your site (and I can’t see that you are) it won’t affect your community or your posts any way. I don’t want to publicly outline which specific behaviors we’ll be looking at, but we do need to give them a little while to see what happens.
If you’re willing to just let them be for now, I’ll follow up on this in two weeks.
Also, if you can let us know what you mean by “tagged” that would be helpful too:
I suspected that the person doing this tagged one of my posts:
https://forfriendswithoutborders.wordpress.com/2019/04/20/close-encounters/
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Yes, I’ll leave them as followers for as long as you’d like. Tagged, meaning ‘liked’ that post. It appears that when I made that post private, it stopped them from following me. When I made that post public, then they followed me. So, I’m assuming that they ‘like’ posts in order to follow bloggers by viewing ‘liked’ posts. I’ve had other bloggers follow me based on tags and categories. When I removed those tags, then they stopped showing up.
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Ah, okay. So they liked the post, then other spammy people started following you, and that like is what you meant by tagged?
Or, is it that you put tags on the post and you suspect the spammy people are following you because of the tag you added?
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In this case, there’s one post that these bloggers ‘liked’. I also believe that there’s one person organizing these follows/likes. Maybe some internet marketing person who’s creeping WP?
In prior cases, I’ve noticed that if I used certain tags/categories, that people would start following. For example, I had a post that mentioned bugs and was tagged with ‘insects’ and soon thereafter, a pest extermination company started to follow me. They were from Seattle, and I’m in Massachusetts, so it didn’t make business sense for them. Anyway, I kept on deleting them, but they kept on returning. It wasn’t until I deleted that tag/category that they stopped following.
In both cases, the follows never left a footprint on my blog in terms of page visits. I have statcounter, and visits never appeared there, either.
That’s why I mentioned the blogger who I reported last year. He made a brief appearance just prior to debbysmith411, and then he disappeared. That’s when she became ubiquitous. So, I thought that they might be one in the same. He’s involved in ‘chat bots’ as part of his new business. Maybe I’m just being a bit paranoid? Either way, both have now disappeared, and have been replaced by the relentless follows of mortgage companies. :-) I’m up to five different mortgage companies who are following me.
I appreciate your help in all of this.
Thanks,
Rob
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One of the followers overnight is Alex Melnichuck. He has a wordpress account, but I keep getting network/dns errors when I try to reach it:
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In both cases, the follows never left a footprint on my blog in terms of page visits. I have statcounter, and visits never appeared there, either.
That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. If someone is using tracking-blocking extensions in their browser, it’s not possible for any stat counter or analytics service to record their visits to your site.
Either way, both have now disappeared, and have been replaced by the relentless follows of mortgage companies. :-) I’m up to five different mortgage companies who are following me.
My advice is to just ignore them. If you choose to have a public site, anyone with a WordPress.com account can follow it or like posts on it. And we have no rule against someone who owns a business following sites who posts about topics relevant to their business. We only have rules against abusing the Follow and Likes features by bulk-following/liking high numbers of sites in a short time period, and if someone does that they get blocked automatically.
By continually removing these people you just send them the message that you’re aware of them and paying attention to them, and if they are indeed spammers, that will just encourage them to up their game, just like telemarketers will call you more often if you answer the phone, thereby confirming to them your phone number is active.
They cannot harm your account or your site in any way by following it, so by ignoring them they’ll just be wasting their own time, and not yours as well.
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Supernovia has asked me to not delete them for a few weeks so that she can analyze them for a bit.
Don’t you find it a bit curious that suddenly a rash of industry related blogs followed all at once? It seems suspicious to me, and there must be a coordinated effort to do this. Also, I’m not the only one. A blogger friend of mine got the same treatment and she decided to go private.
I do appreciate you taking the time to read and help with this issue.
Thank you.
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