Problem with new followers for a site not on wordpress.com (wp.com)

  • Unknown's avatar
    dpajevic · Member ·

    Hello, Our WordPress site is http://www.cjr.org and is not hosted with wp.com. About a week ago, I started receiving 20-30 followers per day for our site. This does not make sense as I don’t host with you and I use custom templates that don’t offer Follow buttons for people to follow us.

    Speculation: We have used Jetpack for a few months back in 2017 and then removed it as it didn’t work well with our site. Is there still some connection with http://www.cjr.org and my wp.com account under (email visible only to moderators and staff)?

    I’ve turned off all comments and discussion on our site when we launched on WordPress in 2017. How do I stop these followers from following us? I want to turn this off.

    Thanks for your help,
    Dean

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

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    I will type modlook into the sidebar tags on this thread for a Staff follow-up. How do I get a Moderator/Staff reply for my question? https://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-help-in-the-forums/#how-do-i-get-a-moderatorstaff-reply-for-my-question

    NOTE: Staff can read redacted email addresses.

  • Unknown's avatar
    thesacredpath · Member ·

    Hi @dpajevic, can you let me know the reference number that follows “If you need to contact support, please include this reference:” in the bottom of one of the emails? Once I have that information, I’ll be able to pull up your data on our end and stop those notices for you.

  • Unknown's avatar
    dpajevic · Member ·

    Hi @thesacredpath

    Thank you, but I do not see any number like that. Here is link to a screenshot of an email I have received: https://snag.gy/Xs02UG.jpg

    Note the link to discussion settings goes to our Discussion page NOT hosted at WordPress.com.

    Please let me know how I can turn off the ability of these people to follow our site.

    Thank you,
    Dean

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hello Dean,

    Just to confirm, the emails are coming to the Gmail address you gave before, correct?

    Do you still have the Jetpack plugin installed on your site at all? And if so, if you click on the Jetpack tab in the WP-Admin dashboard, does it show an option to disconnect?

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Nevermind. It looks like we’ve found the cause:

    It appears on of your posts were recently featured on discover.wordpress.com. That in itself should not have happened, as only WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected sites should be featured there.

    But what we suspect is that during the short while your site was connected to Jetpack, a Reader feed was created for your site, and when you disconnected Jetpack the Reader did not get that message. So all this time your site has had that feed in the Reader, which is likely how the Discover team found the post they featured as well, and the new followers you’re getting are following your site via the follow button showing on your post in the Reader, here:

    https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/53424024/posts/34380

    That in itself is not strange – non-Jetpack sites can be followed in the Reader as well; any site with an RSS feed can be followed in the Reader – but you definitely should not be getting notification emails when that happens if your site is not connected to Jetpack.

    I’ve reported this issue to our Reader team so they can look into it, but it might not be immediate and meanwhile we have no way to stop the emails as there doesn’t exist any settings for your site on WordPress.com. So for now I recommend setting up an email filter in Gmail to automatically delete these emails, so at least they don’t clutter up your inbox and flood you with notifications all day long.

  • Unknown's avatar
    dpajevic · Member ·

    Hi kokkieh,

    Thank you for figuring this out. Much appreciated. Let’s see what the reader team comes up with.

    Best,
    Dean

  • Unknown's avatar
    dpajevic · Member ·

    Hi kokkieh,

    What would the Reader feed URL be at http://www.cjr.org? I don’t see it viewing page source?

    Thanks,
    Dean

  • Unknown's avatar
    thesacredpath · Member ·

    The feed from your site should be https://www.cjr.org/feed

  • Unknown's avatar
    emaildean · Member ·

    Thank you @thesacredpath !

    Best,
    Dean

  • Unknown's avatar
    dpajevic · Member ·

    Hi all,

    Herman brought up a good point: I was originally worried that this was impacting my hosting of the live site in some way. But it is not. Per your suggestion, I have set the filter in Google to archive the emails.

    So let’s let this this go for now and close the ticket(s). We are good. Again, thank you for your time and help.

    Best,
    Dean

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    We still need to figure this out, as it should not be happening, but it’s just a confusion in our subscription system and not an indication of any problem on your site, no.

  • The topic ‘Problem with new followers for a site not on wordpress.com (wp.com)’ is closed to new replies.