People Come and Go So Quickly Here
Hugh’s challenge this week was to find a song that connects with blogging and followers. Well, don’t we all want followers. Of course we do. But as Hugh points out, we get a lot of ghost followers, bloggers who follow you in hopes you’ll follow them, then they disappear. I don’t mind them so much, if their blog has good content that I will revisit. What bugs me the most are fake follows by people/sites trying to sell you blogging or internet services. I would like to remove them as followers but I can’t figure out how to do it. Or even worse, blogs that follow you, but when you try to visit them to see what they are about, you get a message that the blog doesn’t exists. I find this especially mysterious when I click on the follow notification within a couple hours of the follow. I’m not sure what the point is. Though I do wonder if some of those strange follows are just a way to steal/borrow your blog address for merchandising/mass marketing purposes. For the post several months, I have received thousands, yes thousands, of comments from two or three IP addresses. Each comment is from someone trying to sell me “something you buy to protect your automobile if you have an accident” (I can’t write the word because I have put it on my automatic reject list) in almost every state and city in the US. Odd, since I live only in one. For a couple of months the comments were clogging my comment box instead of being redirected to the trash folder. WordPress was finally able to fix that problem, so now I get thousands of comments in my trash folder. Tonight, there are 17,179 comments in my trash. What I find most troubling is that the merchandising comments are supposedly responding to one of my posts (which is referenced in the comment) or on the post of either a blog I follow or the blog of someone who had written me a legitimate comment. This is why I think fake follows might be the problem. I don’t know how to make the merchandising comments stop. I would say that over the last few months, I have deleted or trashed over 40,000 fake comments. Unfortunately, because I can’t check them all, I’m sure I have deleted a few legitimate ones. Maybe Dorothy will lend me her ruby slippers so I can follow the yellow brick road. Perhaps the Wizard would have the answer.
Oh dear, Marie, I feel your pain about those fake followers. That’s an awful lot of fake comments to be getting. I also get a lot, but nowhere the number you get. At least you’re not allowing them to be published on your blog. I’ve seen many fake comments get through and ask myself how on earth the blogger allowed it to get through. Some of them are ‘eye-popping.’
However, as I say a lot, let’s keep blogging fun.
Have a lovely vacation.
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