Strange follower addresses

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  teachcmb56 · Member · Feb 16, 2015 at 12:54 pm

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  Increase in blog followers (3 -5 daily), but I have a feeling they are “spam”;
  EX:
  (email visible only to moderators and staff)
  (email visible only to moderators and staff)
  Increase with commercial ads posted in comment section as well….these ads are getting past spam blockers.
  Should I be concerned?

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

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  kokkieh · Staff · Feb 16, 2015 at 5:26 pm

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  Hi there. Spam followers are a reality, but there’s not much we can do about them. Best to just ignore them, as they’re only after pageviews.

  Regarding the comment spam: Spam tends to come in waves, and are often created by actual people enabling it to fool the spam filters. The best you can do is to keep marking those comments as spam (not simply deleting them), and the spam filter will learn to filter them out over time. If you get repeated spam comments from the same email address, you might consider adding that email/username combination to the comments blacklist.

  You might also want to tighten your comment moderation settings and if you don’t want an email every time a spam comment goes through, you can temporarily disable email notifications.
  See here for links to the relevant support documents: http://en.support.wordpress.com/unwanted-comments/

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  teachcmb56 · Member · Feb 16, 2015 at 6:08 pm

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  Thank you…your response confirms my suspicions. I’ll just wait for this “wave” to pass.

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  kokkieh · Staff · Feb 16, 2015 at 6:14 pm

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  Akismet is pretty quick at learning to filter new spam. Just keep marking them and hopefully it’ll pass quickly.

  Here’s some more on Spam and how Akismet works if you’re interested: http://docs.akismet.com/general/spam-facts/