Bot followers?

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  forfriendswithoutborders · Member · Jul 25, 2018 at 2:08 pm

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  I’ve been getting followed by, what I believe to be, a bot follower. He shows up as “ysweightloss.com” and the site is always down. Most of his posts in reader all come from January 19th, 2018 and nothing since. He/it never comments, never ‘likes’, only follows. I keep on removing this person/bot as a follower, but it keeps on coming back. At this point, it’s merely a nuisance to have to constantly remove it, but the larger issue is if there is software that can crawl a wordpress site and follow it?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  staff-zinnia · Staff · Jul 25, 2018 at 2:55 pm

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  Hi –

  ysweightloss.com isn’t connected to a WordPress.com user account. Are they following you through email subscription? Or can you provide a username for them?

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  forfriendswithoutborders · Member · Jul 25, 2018 at 4:05 pm

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  Thanks for responding so quickly! No, it’s not an email follow, but a regular follow. I did some research and it may be under Simon Weiner. Here’s his gravatar it it helps, but it’s linked to his ysweightloss site:
  https://en.gravatar.com/ysweightloss

  Looks like Simon Weiner is associated with another site, as discussed here:

  https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/followers-that-are-spam-and-have-objectionable-pictures/

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  brookedot · Member · Jul 25, 2018 at 8:16 pm

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  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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  forfriendswithoutborders · Member · Jul 26, 2018 at 11:21 am

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  Thank you very much for your help!