Weird, scary, very strange followers
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I am a little old lady who writes about how to live on a small fixed income. I expected to have a few followers interested in the same thing. For over a year the amount of spam comments far out numbered the real comments by about 5 spam for every 2 legitimate comments and I had 3 or 4 followers. Then suddenly I have a new follower every couple of weeks. The people signed up as my followers can’t possibly be interested in living on a fixed income.
Now really, why would a man who travels the world visiting other millionaires want to follow the blog of a little old lady who teaches someone how to make their own underwear from t shirts?
Why would someone from India, who wrote only one blog post of their own over a year ago about re-posting for a fee, want to follow a blog that teaches how to save energy in the USA?
Why would a preacher in Romania with nearly 96,000 followers sign up to follow a little old lady’s blog about going to get food bank foods?
As far as I can tell, only 3 or 4 of the 36 followers seem to be legitimate. The others appear to be some sort of spam followers or what I call robot followers. Am I right in guessing this is true? Are they using my blog in some sort of ugly way?
Is there a process for me to confirm legitimate followers from those who have ulterior motives or a procedure that allows only real people as followers? Should I simply close the blog and forget about writing a blog so that I’m not scared or spooked everytime I get a new follower?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Are they using my blog in some sort of ugly way?
No as long as you don’t approve any spam comments – since you don’t show subscribers they get no traffic from your site – so no damage to you other than your slightly frayed nerves.
Is there a process for me to confirm legitimate followers from those who have ulterior motives or a procedure that allows only real people as followers?
No – you have no way of approving or deleting subscribers
You DO have full control over which comments are published, so just make sure that no spammers are approved
Why would a preacher in Romania with nearly 96,000 followers sign up to follow a little old lady’s blog about going to get food bank foods?
Maybe they want to pass on your tips to their congregation – hard to say
That you are getting some subscribers is good
To put numbers in perspective – I get around 1,700 spam comments a day on my site (down from over 2,000/day last month) – Akismet catches most of them thankfully and I have between 100 & 200 a day to delete from the spam que – I have comments set to require moderation (I need to approve all comments in case something slips by Akismet) – I get around 1 real comment every 7,000 page views or so
Your blog is in no danger, so keep on sharing your secrets, sounds like you are getting a small but loyal group of followers and visitors, congratulation on a successful blog – keep up the good work
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Thank you for helping. Yeah, it does unnerve me quite a bit when I get followers who have blogs promoting s*x for hire or selling items in the black arts. I’m no stiff shirted prude but I do want my blog to stay family oriented. I guess its not too bad if I only get a few spam compared to your couple of thousand a day. I can’t imagine having a blog so popular that you get that much spam everyday.
Usually my page views will go from 3 or so a day up to around 150 or 200 and then a scary person becomes a follower. The thing that really had me wondering is because I have another blog about being a professional quilter. It has 53 followers and all of them appear to have the same interest. I get very little spam on that blog.
The quilting blog does not have tags. The frugal living blog has lots of tags. Could the use of tags be the reason I get so many scary followers? Maybe I should stop using tags?
BTW that Romanian preacher advertises on his blog that he will reblog a post for a $50 fee or he can review a post for a $50 fee too.
Again, thank you for the help.
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You be welcome
yes there is always someone out there with a scam for reblogging or what ever
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