Stalking, reporting, harassment – and WordPress disallows blocking

  • Unknown's avatar
    crimepiper · Member ·

    I received neither reply nor any help the last time I contacted WordPress unfortunately.
    Another WordPress blogger who owns another True Crime related blog, keeps stalking, harassing and untruthfully reporting my blog for plagiarism.
    WordPress has removed the posts I have definitively proven in my FAQ section this person asked me to post for her, many months before she launched her own blog.
    What WordPress is in dire need of is a blocking function similarly to what tumblr and Blogger offer. And which indeed every social media platform and email provider offers.
    I cannot understand that people who are being bullied online are simply being ignored. This is indeed not ‘my problem’ but an issue facilitated by a lack of features on WordPress which leaves me defenseless, obviously helpless, and takes away from the fun and motivation to create meaningful content for my readers.

    Sincerely,

    Erin Banks from CrimePiper

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    What WordPress is in dire need of is a blocking function similarly to what tumblr and Blogger offer. And which indeed every social media platform and email provider offers.

    WordPress is not a social media platform. WordPress is a piece of software used to build websites, and WordPress.com is a hosting provider for that software.

    Put differently, if you’re on Facebook, you’re in their space, and they control who can see what. This is because the only way to interact with anything on a social media platform like Facebook, is by being signed into an account on that service.

    On WordPress.com you’re on your own space – we provide the software and server space for your website, but we have no control over who can or cannot see your site. It is not necessary to have a WordPress.com account to view or interact with any site hosted on our servers, so it’s completely impossible to block anyone from accessing your site, as there’s nothing to block. Even if we could block the other blogger’s username account from viewing your site, all they’d need to do to get around that is to log out of their account.

    This is true for any public website at any hosting provider. There simply is no effective way to prevent a specific individual from viewing a public website. Technically we can block specific IP addresses from viewing your site, but IP addresses are not unique to specific individuals, and the same individual also won’t always access your site using the same IP, so that method is not effective, and can end up blocking other people whose only crime is using the same internet service provider as the person you want to block.

    So we are not unwilling to take action here. It simply isn’t possible for us to do anything; at least, not without completely changing the way WordPress.com works and turning it from a free and open hosting platform into a walled garden like Facebook that only some people are able to access.

    You do have control over who can comment on your site, and you have the power to block someone from commenting on your own site by adding their email address to your comments blacklist. But someone doesn’t need to provide an email address or a username to simply see your site.

    https://wordpress.com/support/settings/discussion-settings/#other-comment-settings

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