Weird followers
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Okay, the bizarre follows from Outlook arrive by the thousands while WP culls them out with reassurances that they are no threat to anything, reassurances nobody really believes.
Meanwhile, the affected population is comprised exclusively of WRITERS, intelligent, educated and creative minds capable of complex abstract thinking. Among these will be a percentage of techy/sci-fi writers well-equipped to fashion theories explaining the WP bot-plague. And as is frequently the case, one or more of these possible techy/sci-fi scenarios will reveal key aspects of the mystery, leading to its solution.
So come on, geeks and sci-fi people, offer some theories!
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@abigailpadgett, I don’t think WP will have a problem with the resolution, just the prioritization.
That said – in the spirit of writer community unity – since I dig where you were going — solution = WP creates a firewall rule to block out the bot traffic from what appears to be a readily identifiable source.
I’m sure more techy people than me within WP are evaluating the server logs/etc. By doing so, they’ll be able to confirm how to handle the traffic (e.g. figure out the range of IPs, are they being masked, if its some office exploit, etc.).
It would be interesting to hear from WP what the solution is once implemented though!
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@abigailpadgett : “will reveal key aspects of the mystery, leading to its solution.”
… Researching revelations. Story to follow.
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loopholesinlife – If the source is readily identifiable, why aren’t we being told who/what it is? Surely everybody’s dying to know.
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It seems to be happening again because I’ve gotten about 12 strange outlook.com followers. However, when I go into WordPress to try to remove them from following me, they aren’t there- so I’m assuming WordPress is handling this spam?
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Please don’t attempt to derail this thread with speculation and theories. We have provided the facts on this issue, and we are working on fixing it. We will update this thread when we have more information.
But making up theories and explanations that have no basis in fact is not helpful and will lead to this thread being closed to new replies instead.
solution = WP creates a firewall rule to block out the bot traffic from what appears to be a readily identifiable source.
It is not that simple, as these follows are not originating from a single IP address that we can just block, else we’d have done it already, the email addresses don’t follow a fixed pattern for which we can write a quick algorithm to spot similar patterns and just block those as we were able to do in previous waves of follow spam, and we cannot just block all outlook emails as that will also block legitimate WordPress.com users and site visitors.
I know this is annoying – many of us who work here are also receiving these spam subscribers – but for now it’s best to just ignore them.
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@timethief’s comments work fine, but none of the recent ‘followers’ I’ve gotten notice of are on this list…. @Wordpress.com needs to address this.
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I’m so glad there is a thread about this. Lots of new followers all with weird outlook.com emails and yet they don’t show up in my followers list. I wish my blog was actually that popular. Ha. :)
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This is happening every day on my blog and I can’t remove the followers in Email Followers because it doesn’t show that I have any new followers – I just keep getting flooded with emails that several people with Outlook emails are following my blog. Whats up with this? Any chance of danger to my account or getting hacked?
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@lifetothemacs the spammers are either unfollowing on their own, or being forcibly removed.
We’re recommending disabling email notifications for new followers until this is resolved. You can do that under wordpress.com/me/notifications
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The problem with the only solution being to disable email notifications is that some of us actually communicate with people who subscribe to our blogs. Having value-added content that only my blog subscribers receive — upon first subscribing and then later on — is one of the ways I grow and maintain my subscriber base. If I don’t get the new subscription notifications, I can’t do that! So there must be a better solution.
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If you need the notifications, you’ll note earlier in this thread some tips for setting up a filter in your mail program.
We’re also working on a solution here, so these are interim suggestions.
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I have disabled the ‘follow by email’ button on my site in order to avoid the spam followers, which worked for a while. My posts are now being spammed with comments mostly from sites like this: http://WWW.ХХХ.РАКSVQ.ХУZ and http://WWW.SЕХУ.QСQZРJ.ХУZ. I had 22 on the 27th May and 22 again today. The comment contains only the word ‘what’. Not just the post is being targeted but also people who have commented on a post.
I post this here because I think who ever is behind this has found a new way of irritating bloggers and indeed the owners of WP for whatever reason. Many of the emails attached to the fake sites are from Russia. There are no Outlook email addresses this time but I still think it’s the same source of attack on WP, clogging up the system.
My site address is https://pviljoen.wordpress.com. The two posts affected so fare are Erosion and Willow.
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I’ve been getting them like crazy since April on three different wordpress sites. I don’t think they can do any harm… can they? Just makes the sites look like they have more followers, I don’t see the harm in that.
But where are these emails coming from? Are they attached to real people who then feel spammed by our blog posts? Maybe not… in my search about this I noticed that “fake email generators” are quite the thing.
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Thank you. It’s the sheer bulk of it, all from a similar type of ‘site’ that had me wondering if it had something to do with the Outlook spamming. Else it’s a fresh endeavour. Thanks again.
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Hi Happiness Engineers,
I think this “Weird Followers” problem is developing into something more than just weird outlook email followers. I decided to check my stats on email followers. The stat says there are 57, which is about right based on what I remember from a few months ago. Although the email followers stat says there are 57, I am only able to see 30 of my email followers.
The top two in the email followers list are outlook followers, and I am unable to remove them. I feel sad about not seeing the email followers who have been on my email list for many years. Are they getting the emails they subscribed to?
This seems to be getting more serious than just spammers that can be deleted. Thank you for using your expertise in keeping all WordPress bloggers safe. I’m sure you know it is greatly appreciated.
Have a great day getting things figured out.
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Hi there @96isaiah, don’t worry about removing the followers. We’re getting most of the actual spammers so you should be okay — it’s just that right now the email gets to you before we’ve got them removed for you.
I wouldn’t worry about it.
We will keep working on the issue to stop the notification email from reaching you!
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