Weird followers
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As the spammers land in my gmail inbox I mark them as spam. It’s been a few days since I had a weird follower and thankfully no comments on my site.
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@justjennifer I can’t help but think that the outlook.com follower issue is related to the spam issue. The comments are all broadly similar and follow a pattern. Previously I have never had any of them reach me for moderation. They’ve always been caught by the spam filter where I’d delete them. But days after this attack on WordPress with the fake followers I’m getting several messages daily asking me to moderate these exact sort of spam messages. The wording of the comments hasn’t even changed but clearly they are now more successful at evading the spam blocker. Now I have to mark them as spam and *then* go into the spam folder to delete them.
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Yes, the outlook followers have switched to spam. If you have email notificatins turned on for whenever comments are posted, you can see the email address they used to post with the same format as the weird followers, but if you don’t, the name you will see in the Dashboard Comments may be something generically anglo-american sounding. Examples: comment from “Kristi Sanford” is actually from email address (email visible only to moderators and staff); comment from “Alex” is actually from (email visible only to moderators and staff).
It’s pretty easy to tell they are spam from the comments themselves, however, as they are very generic and say nothing abut the content of the blog. They are definitely phishing. One asked for the affiliate link to my host. Am not sure whether they are just ignorant about WordPress.com (which seems doubtful, since they have obviously targeted it), or are trying a new tactic to phish for email addresses, which seems more likely.
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I believe this is winding down. If you continue to receive new spam comments and/or followers feel free to comment here.
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I am no longer getting weird outlook followers despite not having done a thing to block them. Mind you, I’m not getting any new followers at all so in a way I kinda miss the weird ones.
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I’m probably just being paranoid now, so want to mention two followers today, seeming bona fide:
1. https://damudarpan.wordpress.com/ writes in Arabic (I think) and the
2nd: https://artcycling.blog does write in English but with a great very many typos making one think English is a 2nd language. The pattern with both is to like quite a few posts, between 10 and 4, some really old posts, some newer and then the follow. Damudarpan last posted in 2015 while Artcycle posted on the 18th Jan ’18 last, and the one before than in Dec ’17 so on the surface it seems fine. If others are having similar patterns perhaps to clock in? -
Thanks for your help. I am no longer getting strange follwers. I feel bad though–I don’t have many followers in general. Much appreciated.
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I had exactly this problem. Notified of it by a rash of unexpected email follower notifications. Eventually found a few minutes to search and found this thread. Read it. Only then went to my blog (first time in ages) and suspicious batch of fake followers (same domain, unreal names, and so ridiculously out of the blue because I hadn’t posted anything for ages) were not listed as email follows & all looks normal. So for me at least the problem appears to have been resolved. Thank you!
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Hi fionaradic – I appreciate your time here to confirm that the issue has resolved for you. I am going to go ahead and mark this thread resolved.
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Hi fionaradic – I appreciate your time here to confirm that the issue has resolved for you. I am going to go ahead and mark this thread resolved.
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Everything’s good for me now. Had spam followers, said followers making spam comments, and then they all stopped. Well, I mean, they all go to the spam folder now.
Thanks for your hard work, WordPress! -
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I’ve been getting these on a wordpress.com site I manage too, but it’s not just outlook – it’s mail.ru and some .ua sites as well. I’ve been deleting them.
Around the same time, I started getting malware sites in Google Alerts I’d set up – so much so I’ve been thinking of cancelling the Alerts. They would have content that seemed to come from legit sources (including websites/ blogs like mine) but actually linked to malware.
Now I’m wondering if the plan of all the Spam followers is to rip off posted material to create Google-bait. I manage a number of websites. Some are very quiet, and they don’t have this problem.
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sfforest – Which site is this happening on? Can you provide a list of these for me? I’d like to take a closer look. Thanks.
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sfforest – Which site is this happening on? Can you provide a list of these for me? I’d like to take a closer look. Thanks.
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Hi Liz, it’s happening mainly on SFForest.wordpress.com (or, SFForest.org).
I’ve deleted most of them, but there’s a new one:
(email visible only to moderators and staff)The ones I’ve been deleting are either ones from i.ua, or mail.ru, or outlook or gmail with strange alphabet-soup names.
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