A possible bot?
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We will be able to gather more data, as supernovia stated, after a few weeks time. Spam behavior is a legit frustration that we’ve all dealt with or experienced on some level. As kokkieh mentioned, we do have filters in place to catch the vast majority of spam behavior. Let’s let this sit for a few weeks and see what happens.
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You can now add [another probably spammer] to this group of financing bloggers to the list of bloggers recently following me:
[redacted]
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I’m finding the same situation. In my case the same Mortgage blogs from Texas are following both me and Forfriendswithoutborders.com
I suspect that they are using one blog to follow their followers, and increasing their numbers.
It’s annoying, they all had the same gravatar. 1 appeared to be a legitimate broker out of Austin, but I couldn’t find a link to their blog on their website.
I deleted them when they refollowed, and temporarily made my blog private. -
@hrncirwt f you’re willing to follow the same experiment, we’ll follow up on your site in a few weeks as well. Please do include a link to your site.
And @forfriendswithoutborders, thanks; I’m going to remove the link though and put it in our notes so we’re not encouraging them by further linking to their site in these forums.
You can just leave it as is for the next two weeks and we’ll try to spot the spammers then. You can go ahead and avoid clicking on their links or posting them. Thanks!
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I just opened a thread for the exact same problem involving some of the same followers. I had to turn off the like button on all of my posts because within a few minutes of making a post they would “like” it generating a link to their mortgage loan sites.
The names of the gravatars are
texasmortgageexperts
macufederalcreditunion
texasfhamortgagelenders
Alex Melnichuk Mortgage LendingI’ve removed them from my follow list, but they dutifully refollow within an hour of me having removed them.
The behaviour appears abusive. From the threads that I’ve read before there isn’t some way to address this. But there is a **need** to have a way to address this.
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@supernovia – i just read your request to @hrncirwt. If you’d like I’ll also stop responding to their spambehaviour so that you can collect information from my site also ( j2inet.blog).
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j2inet – That’d be ideal. Let’s leave them be for a week or two so we can gather more information and track their behavior on your blog.
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Before I had come to this thread I had complained using the abuse link on one of the gravatars of a presumed bot. This AM I saw that I had an e-mail stating that the specific user would no longer be able to interact in the same manner. Also this morning two new bot showed up:
prodigylending
mortagecompainesI find this a bit discouraging. If the entities behind this are going to just create new IDs as old ones are restricted then even if the offending IDs were all blocked the behaviour may still continue as though it were unobstructed. I’m going to leave the like button enabled for the next couple of weeks but long term as much as I hate to do this disabling the like button might be the only way to not have my blog adorned with mortgage spam.
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Hi,
I’ve had the same problem with mortgage followers when my blog is a general interest site that has nothing to do with finance. Someone in the forum showed me how to delete followers, but they all reappeared within a day. I think I deleted a second time (can’t recall).
So here they are. I can’t believe this is random interest. . . or benign.
texasmortgageexperts
macufederalcreditunion
texasfhamortgagelenders
Alex Melnichuk Mortgage Lending
texasmortgageloanlenders
mortgagecompaines (misspelling is theirs)
prodigylendingBased on the advice I’m seeing in the forum, I’m willing to leave them alone for a few weeks if that will help WP get rid of them.
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Hi,
I’ve had the same problem with mortgage followers when my blog is a general interest site that has nothing to do with finance. Someone in the forum showed me how to delete followers, but they all reappeared within a day. I think I deleted a second time (can’t recall).
So here they are. I can’t believe this is random interest. . . or benign.
texasmortgageexperts
macufederalcreditunion
texasfhamortgagelenders
Alex Melnichuk Mortgage Lending
texasmortgageloanlenders
mortgagecompaines (misspelling is theirs)
prodigylendingBased on the advice I’m seeing in the forum, I’m willing to leave them alone for a few weeks if that will help WP get rid of them.
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I was wondering if you’ve had ample time to follow their behavior yet. If so, I’d like to start to delete their follows, although, I’m sure that they’ll immediately follow again. I would suggest that they aren’t following at all, and they have some sort of software that keys in on tags, categories, or posts that they’ve ‘liked’.
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Please leave them for now, @forfriendswithoutborders, unless you suspect they’re harming the site somehow. Are they liking all of the posts or anything like that?
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Alright folks, I think we’ve caught all of the ones reported here. They shouldn’t be follow-spamming you anymore.
You can now go ahead and remove the ones you listed.
If any come back, or if you see any more like this one, please
– do not remove them
– notify us here, or use a new thread, so we can take a look.Thanks!
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