How to remove a follower

  • Unknown's avatar
    alpheblog · Member ·

    Hey!

    I would like to remove one specific follower. The reason why I’d like to remove them is because, as I assume, they just follow random people in order to comment with a generic message under every single one of their posts, hoping to get a backlink to their profile or something. The generic message they leave is always the same (‘Great post’ + smiley emoji). Some of those messages automatically land in spam (which makes me think they do it with many blogs, not just mine). Some of them, unfortunately, pass, and I have to remove them manually.

    Sure, a meaningless, harmless comment doesn’t hurt, but it’s clear that the person doesn’t care about my work in the slightest and keeping those comments is disrespectful towards my ‘real’ followers (as well as myself, if I’m honest).

    I can see that going to Dashbord->Followers opens a list of followers with a button to remove them. However, there’s no search box, and scrolling through hundreds of people in search for that one annoying account is a bit much. Is there any other place where I can remove a follower?

    Cheers and thanks in advance. :)

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

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Our support page states:

    To remove a WordPress.com follower, go to My Site → People → Followers. Find the follower, and click the Remove link next to their name.

    You can also remove email followers at My Site → People → Email Followers.

    However, this user can use another WordPress.com account to follow you. It would be better to find the spam that the user is posting:

    https://en.support.wordpress.com/unwanted-comments/

    particularly, adding rules to the comment blacklist that you notice this user is continually using whenever they post on your site

    Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!

  • Unknown's avatar
    alpheblog · Member ·

    Hey,

    Thanks for the answer. As I said, I know where I can remove the follower, what I asked about was whether I could do it elsewhere. My Site -> People -> Followers doesn’t have a search box, so I’d have to scroll through hundreds of accounts to locate and remove the spammer. Not the most convenient way, is it?

    For now, I’ve added a rule to comment moderation, but it’s an automated cure, not a prevention method in this case.

    Seeing that you’re a member of staff, I think my last question would be whether you could tell the coding team that search boxes in case of grids with numerous rows (thousands, loaded dynamically every 15 or so records, so Ctrl+F doesn’t help) are a must.

    It’s even more frustrating that the ‘Team’ tab does have a search box (while most personal blogs only have 1 person there), the ‘Email Followers’ tab does have a search box, and suddenly the ‘Followers’ tab does not have that search box! Why is that?

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    You’re correct, this is inconsistent.

    I’ve reported it to our team to take a look.

  • Unknown's avatar
    alpheblog · Member ·

    Any updates on the issue? :) Or any place where I could track open issues (I’ve only found that for the new editor)? I know it’s just a small inconsistency, but it’s frustrating to the point that I went through all of WordPress-related public repositories on Github, hoping I’d be able to write the missing function myself, to help you out and make it done faster ._.

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hi! Yes, you can track the issue here:

    https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/30200

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