Countermeasures against commercial spam bloggers
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Good day. I’ve been blogging on the Free WP Platform over at https://themonchingsguide.wordpress.com for nine years now, and I’ve noticed that my blog has been frequented by commercial spam bloggers who abuse the Like function.
I do report this abusive behavior, but it seems that no one is actually responding and the spammers get a free pass.
With that said, are there any countermeasures (e.g. plugins, etc.) that Free users like me can avail of to address the issue? Appreciate your responses.
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Accepted answer
Hi there,
Thank you for those reports, our terms of service team investigates each one. To clarify, there is no specific way to block someone from clicking the “like” button on your site since it’s public on the internet, so by the very nature of the web, this will attract spammers from time to time.
We do our best to prevent that spam, and your reports add to our spam filter to improve it’s performance, but spammers are of course also changing all the time and adopting new strategies to get around those measures, so it’s a constant battle.
The only way to fully prevent this kind of spam (which I agree, is very annoying) is to turn off your like buttons altogether. If you wish to consider this option let us know.
Otherwise, we appreciate your reports and will continue to investigate, thanks!
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Thank you likewise for your reply! I’ve already removed the like buttons on my main blog and turned off omnibus notifications for likes on my side of things. Unfortunately, I do believe that while WP does its best — most of the time, the reports end up being naught as the spammers go back to their usual activity the next day.
Worse, my reports even get challenged — with some support staff even asking me for “justification” as to why I report the spammers in the first place.
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Unfortunately, I’ll be reviving this thread with an update.
Over the past few days, my blog has been under attack from African spammers. Reporting the bad actors is of no use, as it appears that the spammers are on the paid plans.
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Hi there,
When someone likes your post, that is definitely an annoyance, but I want to clarify that in no way does it represent an attack on your site, and there is no way for someone to compromise it just by clicking the like button.
Additionally, we are limited in how we can help here in this forums we do not discuss terms of service issues in the public view. As a result we are not able to help with any of the reports that you have submitted so far and you will need to follow up on those via email on those reports if you wish. But because the like button on your site does not represent a direct security threat, there is a limit to the actions our terms of service staff are able to take as well, so they may not be able to act on every incident you report.
Let us know if you need further assistance or if you have any questions.
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