Spam blogs trying to force me to sub to them
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Hello, so as far as I can see these forums are the only place I can contact anyone at WordPress for help without being a paid user.
I keep getting emails from blogs trying to sign me up to get a “free iPhone” or similar. It’s getting ridiculous. I don’t want to turn off emails because I still want to get feedback and updates from WordPress, is there any way to disable anyone from typing in your email on their blog and trying to force you to follow them?
Usually when I go on the spammers blog it has a text field where you can put in your email and follow them, it seems dumb that anyone can just take x amount of emails and be able to do this.
Here is an example image of these emails: [link redacted by mod]
Thanks
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Hello,
You can follow this documentation to set an automatic filter https://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-moderation
And this doc will help you set specific words to put a comment on a block list https://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/discussion-settings/#comment-blacklist
Please let me know if this helps :)
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I think these are actually people entering your email they found somewhere on the web into a Jetpack subscription form, based on that email and another example I’ve seen. I can’t think of any way to prevent that or mark that as spam. You can remove the subscription at https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?option=pending
Because I think this is something staff should take a look at, I’m going to go ahead and modlook tag it.
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Thanks for the fast replies there,
Cheers sekanderb I will give this a try and see if it works when I get back infront of my of my PC 👍
And thanks darciemg, definitely what I was thinking. Ive been using WordPress for years, surprised this hadn’t become an issue for me until recently but I’m sure many others are victim, too
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@applemania141 My antivirus program blocked the link in your first post, so I’ve removed the link in order to safeguard other users that may encounter it in the forums or search engine caches. Thanks for your understanding. It would be safer to take a screenshot instead and upload it to your site’s media library for Staff to look at.
I keep getting emails from blogs trying to sign me up to get a “free iPhone” or similar.
Is this regarding your site at stuff4free141.wordpress.com or a different site?
Is the sender in those emails @wordpress.com? If not then they are not being sent by WordPress.com
If they are notifications from @wordpress.com of new spam comments then you’ll want to mark those comments as spam so that Akismet, our anti-spam software, learns.
You might also want to scan your computer for any malware or virus.
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@justjennifer, The sites they’re getting notified of are not hosted here. They’re the usual blog subscription email, except they didn’t subscribe themselves. The blog isn’t hosted here, it’s not even on a domain name on another instance I saw. The site is bare bones on an IP and has Jetpack connected, and is just entering random emails from a list on the web to send spam.
It is not related to their sites or accounts here, other than they have an account with the same email address. It’s not related to their computer. They’re not spam comments, so they can’t be marked as spam. It’s very sneaky.
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@darciemg Thanks for the clarifications.
The site is bare bones on an IP and has Jetpack connected, and is just entering random emails from a list on the web to send spam.
If the abusing sites in question are not hosted here on WordPressdotcom but using Jetpack to create these subscriptions, then it should be reported to Jetpack directly, but I’ve added back the modlook tag.
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Hi there,
I keep getting emails from blogs trying to sign me up to get a “free iPhone” or similar.
How many emails would you say you’ve received over what time period? According to our logs, only two such emails have gone out from our system over the past 5 days, and I only see two pending subscriptions for Jetpack sites in your account. So if you’ve received any more emails than that, those did not come from our system and we can’t do anything about it.
We have a limit on the number of pending email subscriptions you can receive and also for the number of sites you can subscribe to within a certain period of time, exactly to try and prevent people from signing you up to sites against your will, but with only two pending subscriptions you’re nowhere near that limit. So the only option to not get these emails is to block all subscription emails in your account’s notification settings.
As @darciemg correctly surmised above, these emails are caused by someone typing your email into the blog subscription widget on various sites. As those sites are not in our control there is nothing we can do to prevent this from happening. We can only help you control how many emails you receive, either by manually blocking all emails, or by our automated blocks if your account hits our limits.
The other option is to set up a filter in your email account to automatically delete these emails as they come in. That way they won’t clutter up your inbox and bug you with notifications all the time.
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