Sudden influx of new followers
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I am not egotistical enough to believe that my little, infrequently updated website is suddenly so popular with Internet deities that it would justify the number of new followers it has received in the last 48 hours. Can’t find a reason in my site referrers and indeed looking at some of these new followers’ empty sites has left me scratching my head.
While I realize that there is really nothing that can be done in terms of banning these followers (short of making my site Private), I thought I’d at least report this oddity. If anyone has an explanation for this phenomenon, that’d only be a bonus. Thanks.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hey Jen!
I took a look, and while I can’t say exactly how the new followers found the site or what caused the influx, I’m not seeing anything unusual. The followers seem to have active blogs so I don’t think this is a bug of any kind. I’ll keep my eyes out though for similar issues.
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Hi Jeremey – I stopped looking after about the 15th new follower (now 45 new followers in 4 days), but the activity level is certainly odd to me given past activity. Thanks for keeping tabs.
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I definitely understand. We’ve had some reports of stats fluctuations, but I don’t think that’s the same thing going on here. If this becomes a more prevalent issue though, we’ll definitely take a look!
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152 new followers since November 10th at a fairly steady rate throughout each day. Since I have a total of 225 followers since the start of my site in 2011 I find this highly unusual to say the least.
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1) SEND THEM TO MEEEEEE!
2) Might they be hot linking your pictures, and following you because some moronic web guru said this would somehow atone for it?
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Definitely a pretty huge uptick in followers. Based on your previous stats, it doesn’t look like these are all coming from a certain referrer. We haven’t had any other reports that I’m aware of from anyone else that would indicate this is some kind of larger issue, but will keep an eye out.
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@rain-
1.) somehow I think I should be asking you. :)
2.) my site stats don’t seem to support that.@jeremey- On Nov. 29th, I made my above site Private and whatever was causing this behavior stopped. Today I made my site Public again and within a short period, the same behavior started up. Smells like a script to me.
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Thanks, @justjennifer, for pointing me to this thread because this is exactly what’s been happening on my site the last couple of weeks (heatherawsumb.com). It looks like about 26 followers since the beginning of the month. The usernames and email addresses all look pretty suspicious and, like yours, mine is a sleepy, not frequently updated blog.
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@heatherawsumb-Thanks for posting here as well.
@jeremeylduvall – I’m now up to around 75 new followers since the 4th.
And it looks like another member with this or a similar problem https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/whats-the-deal-with-all-the-spammy-subscribers-to-my-blog?replies=3
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I’m having exactly the same issue, as outlined in a separate thread here. If anything, I’m getting even more of these ‘spammy subscribers’ – on Dec 13th alone I got something like 40 new follows.
I’ve gotten to over 500 followers now. I don’t know what my real number was exactly before they started flooding in recently, but it was <100.
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I’m trying to understand the “followers” motivation for doing this. Are they hoping you will follow them in return or trying to build up fake web identities for a group of userids—sort of the catfish of the blogging sphere on a more massive (perhaps automated) scale? Is there value in being a follower of a number of blogs?
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I have been getting a bunch of new followers in the last two days all from @nokiamail.com. They all feel spammy. (www.thedesigningfairy.com). I have an active blog, but these are weird email addresses.
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Just as suddenly as it started, the deluge of new followers on my above site stopped on the 18th of December.
Even with the additional reports by other WPcom users, finding the reason for this behavior hasn’t been a Staff priority nor did I expect it to be. But now that the behavior has stopped, I hope Staff will still be able to find the cause and prevent it from happening in the future.
If your site is encountering a sudden increase in followers that appears to not be organic growth, please feel free to post about it here.
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That’s funny, because my deluge just keeps going and possibly increasing. Very annoying that there’s no solution to this.
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I wonder if this is related:
Today, my test blog got a follower. No posts on that site have ever contained a tag, so I seriously doubt the blog was found in the Reader. Today, it has no views and no referrals and, therefore, no clear way for the person to have hit a “follow” button.
I checked the person’s gravatar profile and it has three links to something called WordPress PlusThemes… so I assume this is a spammy follower.
My test blog’s URL is testable2.wordpress.com.
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@bumblepuppies – Definitely looks like it! Thanks for posting. I’ll be keeping this thread updated as we learn more.
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