How do I stop followers from following my blog?
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I have a whole lot of “followers”, who keep appearing, on my blog that’s open to search engines. They are not serious followers, but people who have money-generating websites – their aim is apparently to get me or others to help them make money online. I can’t find a way to unsubscribe them without emailing them (thereby giving them my email address) and asking them to do so. This blog has subjects of a spiritual, reflective, and sometimes sacred nature; it’s concerning to me that they are choosing this sort of unrelated blog and I don’t want them on there.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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If you want to have a public blog you’ll have to accept that ANYONE with an internet connection will be able to follow your blog – they don’t even have to have WordPress accounts. There is no way to prevent people from following a public blog and no way to remove followers from your blog.
The only way to control who can and cannot follow your blog is to set it to private, in which case only people you specifically invite will be able to access it: http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/
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How about creating a gmail account just for this purpose such as “(email visible only to moderators and staff)” and then emailing these folks to request they stop spamming you.
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I would never email anyone that I found to be spamming me because doing so would provide my email address to them.
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Creating a bogus email account to tell someone to stop visiting a specific a public blog simply puts you on par with spammers- don’t do it.
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We cannot block specific IP addresses because they are not unique and have not been for over a decade. ISPs place hundreds of us in the same IP block to save money. Only about 30 – 40% of the IP addresses actually trace back to an individual computer and those numbers are descending. More to the point is many have dynamic IPs (ever changing IP addresses).
Anyone can get a new IP in a couple of minutes.
Anyone can get a new email address in a couple of minutes.
Anyone with internet access can subscribe to any public blog in a feedreader.
Anyone with internet access can read any public blog.Blocking would be a useless exercise.
The bottom line here is we WordPress.com users have no management capability over followers. http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2013/04/09/wordpress-com-follower-management/
Please see this thread with staff response
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/preventing-spammers-from-being-notified-of-new-posts?replies=120Also look at forum tags to find others talking about the same topic. Here is one:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/tags/spam-followersre: porno followers
On the bottom of your > Settings > Discussion page you can set the maximum rating for gravatars. If someone has an inappropriate rating for a Gravatar image that’s actually porno orientated you can use the “Report Abuse” link on their Gravatar profile bottom right hand corner to let Staff know. If the follower has an inappropriate blog hosted here at WordPress.com, you can also report that to Staff. See here Report Mature or Spam Blogs http://en.support.wordpress.com/report-blogs/ -
Thanks for your help all. I guess that’s part of having a blog – it just feels weird to know these people can see whatever I post, when they’re just trying to get money or traffic themselves and couldn’t care less about the topics I’m posting about. You have to weigh up the pros and cons.
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