Suspiscious 'followers'

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  franzfuls · Member · Feb 22, 2014 at 9:51 am

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  I am experiencing scam/spam related interaction on my blog.
  suspiscious users start following my blog. Their profiles and blogs link to strange ‘tracker-like’ hyperlinks, linked to messages like: “follow our facebook page”

  examples:
  http://frailbeach37pmi.wordpress.com/
  http://girlsarepretty.wordpress.com/
  http://ilikelatinas.wordpress.com/

  How to I block such users. I do not want my credible followers to get trapped when looking at their profiles.
  Please find to ban such users from your site.

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

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  gracejiyoung · Member · Feb 25, 2014 at 9:24 pm

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  Hi Franz,

  While you aren’t able to remove or block followers from your public site you are able to control your privacy options at Settings -> Privacy. There you can set a site to private and have full control over who can access and subscribe to content. We have more details about this at:

  http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/

  For public blogs anyone can subscribe, but rest assured unless these followers are commenting on your blog, I don’t see a reason for any confusion with other followers.

  Followers will only receive email notifications whenever you publish a post – that is all.

  Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

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  franzfuls · Member · Feb 25, 2014 at 9:32 pm

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  Thank you Grace.

  Why then would people create fake blogs linking to misleading (porn-ish) pages.
  These pages are misleading, and greatly diminish the value of wordpress.com. They have nothing of value to contribute.

  My guess is that (like me), other people check out the profiles of other people that like a good post. So they set a trap.

  Would be nice if wordpress.com could do something about this.

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  gracejiyoung · Member · Feb 26, 2014 at 4:50 pm

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  Hi Franz,

  Unfortunately, I don’t know the motivation why some people create certain blogs. I know it can be frustrating, and we do try our best to rid WordPress.com of spam blogs. Once we are made aware of blogs breaking our Terms of Service policy we will remove them accordingly. However, at the moment I’m not seeing a clear break in Terms of Service.

  If this is a huge inconvenience for you, I recommend setting your site to private and just invite the people you want to view your site. :)

  Cheers!