Followers, How do I remove a follower from my list of followers?

  • Unknown's avatar
    brotherjulianosl · Member ·

    Dear sir/madam,

    Please advise as to how I can remove a follower from my list of followers?

    Thank you for your help.

    Regards Julian.

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

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    I’m afraid you can’t do that. If your blog is set to public anyone can follow it. The only way to control who follows your blog is to set it to private. Then only people you specifically add as viewers will be able to follow you and see your blog. http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/

  • Unknown's avatar
    brotherjulianosl · Member ·

    Thank you Kokkieh for your quick response. I will stop looking for a way to remove followers.

    I am very new to blogging, so I was using other email addresses I have to learn about following. So now I have signed in to the other email accounts and unfollowed each from my blog.

    Is this common for blogs; to not to be able to remove followers? I understand that with a public blog we cannot stop followers from following. But it seems to me that being able to remove a follower would be a useful.

    What happens about dead email addresses? Are blog sites sending out emails to addresses that no longer exist or are no longer being used by the account holder, but still exist as an account? If so, with the number of blogs on the internet, this must be taking an appreciable bandwidth.

    Anyway, thank you for your help. It can be very hard to find-out that something you would like to do, is not possible to do. So thank you for your quick help; you have saved me many hours to searching.

    Thank you.
    Regards, Julian.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Is this common for blogs; to not to be able to remove followers?

    I don’t know about other platforms, but on WordPress that’s how it works. There are very good arguments for having this ability, but just as many good arguments for not having it. I’ve never thought about the bandwidth issue, but I’m sure the WP developers have taken that into account.

    Of course the best argument for removing followers is that sometimes undesirable followers appear on our blogs. I here specifically refer to people running MLM schemes and follow our blogs in an attempt to drive traffic to their sites, and this past week there had been recurring complaints of a porn actress following blogs for the same reason. If you have the My Community widget, for example, their profile photos will be visible on your blog and create a link to their sites, which none of us want.

    If an undesirable blogger on WordPress follows you you can report them, provided they are in violation of the terms of service. (http://en.support.wordpress.com/disputes/#reporting-content) Self-hosted bloggers you can try and report via Gravatar, or in a serious case like the porn actress, you can also start a thread here, but staff will only remove a follower in an extreme situation like that.

    They’re apparently looking into giving us the ability to at least hide such followers’ photos from appearing in our follower widgets, but it’s not a sure thing that it will happen.

    Meanwhile, also be aware that you can block people from commenting should your blog attract a troll. Simply add their username, email and blog URL (NOT their IP address) to the comments blacklist under Settings ->Discussion on your dashboard. http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-blacklist

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