Followed by a bot?
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The latest follower of my blog is:
(email visible only to moderators and staff)That looks suspicious. My blog is public, so I can’t delete the follower. Mail to that address does not bounce. My browser times out waiting to connect to newsletters.fuuzle.com, http://www.fuuzle.com, and fuuzle.com.
I wouldn’t mention this here except there’s no reason to think my blog was targeted. It’s for a genealogy club! So there may be lots of blogs getting followers like this. Should we worry about it?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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The username part of the email address I gave is:
218d304f-e6bf-4d68-9dfe-29f8b2947e7f
That’s what’s suspicious about it. -
Should we worry about it?
Not really – it is annoying at times, but not a security risk to your blog at all
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Thanks for asking. I was wondering the same when I saw the same thing. What caused me to check was that I received a message yesterday to say that my blog Photobooth Journal was a new subscriber to my blog Photobooth Journal. Have you had this happen?
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photoboothjournal: Yes, my message said something like that too. I think it was a hiccup in the messaging software: it didn’t know what to do with the long alphanumeric username and didn’t put it in the message.
I can’t see who would find this kind of data — posts from randomly selected blogs — useful. Google? The NSA? What would anybody do with it?
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Thanks to azscvgs. That information has put my mind at ease. It felt like someone with sinister intentions had followed my blog without wanting me to know who it was – Facebook has made me paranoid! As to the reason these organisations do this, could it be about finding out about things that are trending at the moment and then targeting advertising to those interests? Just a guess.
Re sribebica’s comment, I don’t think there is a way to fix it. Now I know what it is, I feel more comfortable about it. Both times it has occurred for me have more or less coincided with me being the target of cyber bullying on Facebook, so it did worry me at first.
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When I’m logged in, the message for the “Follow Blog” widget says: “You are following this blog, along with 169 other amazing people.” Maybe it should say “168 other amazing people and 1 bot”? ;-)
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Hi I got the same message yesterday and now I’m little concern about that. This is the follower: (email visible only to moderators and staff)
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Hello, i have the same follower: (email visible only to moderators and staff).
Yersterday wordpress send me an email, they detected suspicious activity on my account and reset my password. Maybe it was a coincidence but I don´t know.My blog is: deprincesasymeigas.com
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I had one subscribe today and I felt suspicious, so I did some googling. Some people think these weird newsletters.fuuzle.com subscriptions may be linked to content scraping. My public blog is with Blogger and I’ve just deleted the subscription. Can’t you get rid of subscribers in WordPress then?
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Just made an post on it on my blog :
This is what I found myself :
http://stopforumspam.com/ipcheck/149.210.137.43
Toxic IP address or “bad” email domain
No activity seen from this IP in approximately 7 weeks
If someone could tell me , how to remove this dormant critter , many thanks !
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I mentioned my blog is for a genealogy club and suggested nobody would want to target that. But “The Economist” had an article on tax fraud which said ID thieves might follow genealogy-related web content, looking for information on the recently deceased. So who knows.
@perpetua3: no, you can’t get rid of email followers of public blogs at WordPress.com, as far as I know.
Maybe WordPress should give bloggers the option to turn on some type of CAPTCHA mechanism for follower sign-ups.
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Well , it is beginning to dawn on me that there is no way at all for me ( as a WP user ) to solve this problem , and that it can only be solved by WP itself by taking some measures .
Yes , a kind of CAPTCHA feature would be the perfect solution ( for at least all future subscriptions ). An installed CAPTCHA button , would be asking all new subscribers to reproduce something manually , and this would prevent internetbots to subscribe to your blog .
Hope someone from WP is actually reading this forum ( ??? ) , and that they can help the many WP users to solve their problem to get rid of these dormant bot-critters !
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I mentioned something like CAPTCHA as a remedy. But one problem is that anything to keep out bots also makes it harder for people; so blogs might fail to sign up some potential followers, if they used a CAPTCHA mechanism. A second is that it’s unclear what the benefit is of keeping bots out; so why bother? — I’m not liking my own suggestion so well anymore.
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When I subscribe for a newsletter , I am often asked in a new smaller window , to reproduce something manually , it is not that much of a hassle .
Another option would be that blog holders would have a report button to make WP clear that there is a very suspicious email address among their subscribers .
Together with a window space where you could write down your own reason(s)or motivation(s) for reporting to them such a particular email address .
And leave it up to WP to evaluate and eventually delete such a suspicious email-address from your subscribers .
Such an moderation option does only exist for the comments you recieve on your own posts ( approve , unapprove , trash , mark as spam ) , but does not exist for your the email list of your subscribers .
Hope somebody from WP is reading also , because I know from other media stories about big companies ( Facebook or like ) , that it is impossible to contact a human being , the day you are having some serious problem ( identity fraud , hate profiles , hate mail , … )
My gut feeling is that this Fuuzle bot is collecting addresses and names for sending out spam
But nevertheless , I prefer to have this Fuuzle critter removed .
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My gut feeling is that this Fuuzle bot is collecting addresses and names for sending out spam
Followers (Those with WP accounts and email followers) do not have access to your email address unless you communicate with them in some way.
But nevertheless , I prefer to have this Fuuzle critter removed .
I fully agree with you there, but until WordPress lets us delete/block followers, we are just plain stuck with them. I’ve stopped public blogging for the most part because of this. I miss this because it was so easy to schedule out a bunch of posts when I had time.
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