Odd Bunch of New Followers
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In the past couple of days, I’ve gotten about 10 new E-mail followers, a rate considerably above the norm. Although I can’t point to anything bad happening, it seems a bit suspect to me: all the addresses are from ‘hotmail.com’, and all the user names are of the form: nameXXX, where name is a first name (such as ‘elsa’), and XXX is three or four (apparently) random letters. It seems unlikely that this would occur by chance; might it be harbinger of some naughtiness?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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They may be dodgy but we cannot remove or block subscribers from subscribing to any public blog. Nothing can be posted to your blog if you set it up for full comment moderation. http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/
If you suspect they are ripping off your content you can use Copyscape.
http://www.copyscape.com/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/content-theft-what-to-do/ -
I’m not suggesting that they be removed or blocked (and I do moderate comments). It just seemed an odd business, and I thought it was worth mentioning somewhere; it might be a piece of someone else’s puzzle.
As far as the content goes, it is licensed under Creative Commons BY SA 3.0, so I’m not fussed about that. Thanks for the pointer to the Copyscape tool; I’m glad to know of it.
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richg74, I’ve noticed the very same thing on my blog (http://namibsands.wordpress.com). Over the last couple of days, I’ve had about 9 new email followers, all of them with hotmail addresses, exactly like you describe.
I think it’s definitely dodgy and I wish I could remove them as followers from my blog, because I don’t think these are real people.
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I’ve gotten a few more in the last day or so, all conforming to the same pattern. As I said in an earlier post, I can’t see that anything bad is happening, but I’m a bit suspicious of this apparently purposeful but seemingly pointless activity.
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It’s probably that they are blog scrapers, posting your content elsewhere without permission. Follow these instructions:
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Raincoaster, none of the new hotmail.com followers actually have blogs, so I cannot determine whether they are blog scrapers or not. (But thank you for the link, it is definitely useful!)
When I go to the list of ’email followers’ under which they are listed, they just have the little grey man icon next to them; only one or two of these go to a Gravatar link, the others do not. Also, the name on the Gravatar page does not coincide with the name in the email address. And the Gravatar link itself does not contain a link to any blogs or websites.
I think these are not legitimate followers, or even real people, and that WordPress should look into it. Should I email support with a list of the names to check?
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I understand you can’t just click on their names and find their blogs, but if you google the first line of each of your posts, any place they’ve posted it will show up.
Staff have basically said that spammers can try to follow your blog but they can’t hurt you, so don’t worry about them. There is no point as far as I know in bringing the names to staff’s attention.
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