fake email subscribers
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Over the last few days, I’ve probably received what appears to be about 30 fake subscribers on my blog. I can tell because the names are weird, they don’t actually have a site or a photo, or it links back to some blog that doesn’t have anything on it. This is inflating my subscriber count. Anyway, I want to block these subscribers, or at least have something that doesn’t allow them to sign up from now on.
How can I do that?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Thanks. I think it would be great if they would allow us to approve or not approve subscribers. I can almost automatically tell if it’s a spammer or not. 2 or 3 more subscribed this morning. Frustrating.
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Just an observation – not everyone has a picture or web site – most of my friends don’t have web sites and some have real strange email names
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I reported the same problem this morning as well. These are not email followers but apparently dummy WordPress blogs: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/wordpress-followers
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I didn’t get any fake subscribers, but last week got probably about 400 views in three different short spurts on three different days all from WordPress.com.
Been here for almost 7 months and that’s never happened before.
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@planetcommonsense – your situation sounds like this: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/72-pages-in-53-seconds?replies=16
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WordPress, can you guys look into this? I’m still getting subscribers from “dummy blogs” as he describes above. I’ve probably had 50-60 spam subscribers in the last 4 days. PLEASE fix and tell me how to block or unsubscribe these fake accounts.
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This thread has been previously flagged for Staff attention. Please be patient while waiting for a response.
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robthebruce76 and tcmacrae, I looked into your subscription stats and don’t see anything out of the ordinary, just a spike in new subscriptions.
We have made it much easier for WordPress.com users to follow blogs site-wide, which I believe is what the spike is.
This doesn’t appear to be malicious as a user will need to have a WordPress.com account (which requires email confirmation) to follow a blog, non-user email subscribers similarly need to accept an email confirmation, and there is absolutely no pay-off from a spammer angle (subscriber info is only seen by the blog’s admin).
It looks like you’ve just gotten a healthy bunch of new subscribers thanks to our more visible Follow system.
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It seems really fishy to me. 90% of these people don’t have actual blogs. One of them was a blog that just has photos of Miley Cyrus and no posts. A couple of them are blogs with one post, fake comments, and the usual “Just another WordPress site” tagline.
Could you just keep an eye on this? I’ll take your word for it right now, but I’ve followed my blog subscriber # closely since I started the blog and the last week has been weird. I’ve got a lot of subscribers in a short span before with Freshly Pressed, but never so many that don’t have profile photos, have blogs with no posts, and have strange names. Like I said, it just seems fishy.
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I started a thread very similar to this a few days ago:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/sudden-increase-in-followers?replies=2#post-732050
@robthebruce76 @tcmacrae, I’m with you guys on feeling suspicious about this healthy new “interest” in my blog. I want to be excited about 50+ new followers in a few days, but I think only a handful are legitimate blogs. A couple times now, some new subscribers have re-blogged entire articles from my blog onto their virtually empty blog. Harmless? Probably. Suspicious? Yes.
I’ll take the word of the staff as well, but please do keep an eye on it.
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A couple times now, some new subscribers have re-blogged entire articles from my blog onto their virtually empty blog. Harmless? Probably. Suspicious? Yes.
Reblogging amounts to using an excerpt. Reblogging a whole post can be content theft. if anyone dared to reblog and entire post from my blog and violated my copyright I would send a DMCA take-down notice to their web host immediately.
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As the subscribers continue, my question for macmanx:
You mentioned the new follow system–are you referring to the option to click “follow” within the stats page? Other than a jump in search engine traffic, which I’m not seeing that much of, I’m not sure what is making my blog more visible and thereby attracting new followers. Basically I’m asking, how are these new changes making my blog, or any blog, more visible?
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What I said the “New Follow System,” I was referring to the Follow button that users see in the admin bar. It’s a bit more visible after the Admin bar was cleaned up. Also, the Follow tab which appears for users who aren’t logged in.
Basically, following blogs is easier than ever before as the option is visible on every page.
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Reblogging amounts to using an excerpt. Reblogging a whole post can be content theft. if anyone dared to reblog and entire post from my blog and violated my copyright I would send a DMCA take-down notice to their web host immediately.
Sorry, I didn’t divulge the full info there.
I didn’t take any action because I received a message to approve a comment, whereupon the subscriber has “reblogged” my post, and then I am shown as the original author, with a link back to my blog. This same subscriber reblogged other authors with comments like, “awesome! love this!” – Looks to me like WordPress is functioning similarly to Tumblr.
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staff-blorbo
It looks like you’ve just gotten a healthy bunch of new subscribers thanks to our more visible Follow system.
Sorry, but I’m not buying it. The subscriptions continue unabated, virtually all of them link back to a blog with a wierd name, the default tagline, and just the starter “Hello World” post. Am I suffering harm? No. Does it appear any of my content is being stolen? No. Has it made ‘Subscription’ a worthless feature for me to pay attention to? You bet!
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Just to elaborate, it all started with assidarji, the first of 52 new WordPress followers in the past 7 days. It took me nearly 3 years to accumulate the previous 112 WP followers – none of whom have the same fishy names, default taglines, and lack of content save for the standard ‘Hello World’ post.
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Maybe some friends are messing with you? I know a bit elaborate for sure, but I have done similar things way back in a past lifetime.
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Does anybody have more tenable ideas? It seems more than coincidental that I saw ~1,000% increase in spam comments just before this happened. Perhaps these fake blogs and subscriptions are being setup to allow spam robots to better target their attacks against active blogs.
Or, we can just continue pretending nothing is going on here and close every topic that is opened on this subject.
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