Recently, I have been bombarded with comment “likes” from sexually related web sites with .ru extensions. Because I can’t find a way to block this type of “like,” I am going to temporarily turn off likes on all my new posts. If any of you have had this problem and found a solution, please let me know. While I probably shouldn’t care where a “like” comes from, these must be automated. Each web address is slightly different. I hesitate to include any in this post. And I have been having such a problem with comment spam for the last couple of years (over 50,000 and still arriving) that I can’t deal with more spam at the moment. So, if you like my posts for the foreseeable future, just send me a mental like. Thanks, Marie
The New 3 Rs: Retire, Recharge, Reconnect 
As of today, they are still coming through, Marie. Where they leave a comment, they are ending up in my WordPress spam folder. There’s nothing you can do to stop them appearing as a ‘like’ against a comment on your blog other than by disabling ‘likes’ on comments altogether. WordPress is aware of the problem, but from what I am reading they are just hoping that Akismet will catch all of them. To my horror, I’ve seen some bloggers allow comments including the spam link to appear on their blog posts. I’ve also read of one case where somebody who clicked on the link, then had their computer infected with a virus. So, my advice to anyone who sees these comments and links is to totally ignore them and not click on them.
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Spam now seems to be catching most of mine. The rest I have sent to spam. I agree about not clicking on them. WP hasn’t been great about dealing with spam, other than , as you said, hoping Akismet will catch them. If only their “happiness engineers” all gave consistent guidance on the subject. 🙂 Happy Monday.
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Yes. Happening to me too. Did you notify wordpress?
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Hi. Apparently a lot of people notified SO and they dealt with it. I haven’t had any in the last couple of days.
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Same thing happening here – I did report it to outlook, but will report to WordPress as well.
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Hey. I guess WP had a lot of reports and the issue has been fixed. ☺
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Looks like it – thank goodness.
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What was the response from support on WordPress?
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Hi. I guess WP had lots of reports and has resolved the issue. I have turned my likes back on and haven’t had any issues.
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Me too. I guess they found a way to stop it. Hard to do because the source was not form any WP site. they, and I, reported the problem to Gravatar. I was ab le to link to their gravatars and report it as porn. That helps. Glad you turned your likes back on. I had a similar problem with other social media sites until I learned how to block it.
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Oh no, the sexy Russians are back. This time making actual comments on comments. Though their comments are just punctuation marks and not words. Sigh.
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Blat! report it at once to WP and ask them how to stop it. Do you have access to their chat?
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p.s. I found a way to block comments form any web addresses containing certain bad words.
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I noticed that most are now being caught by the spam filter. WP is working on it. It apparently happened to lots of blogs. Have a great week.
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I have the same, suddenly….but I’m just ignoring them
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☺
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It seems it was an April 1st thing….
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I’ve had a few similar issues Marie attached to comments, not actual comments which would make it easier to block, but alas I have no solution at the moment.
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Yes, I noticed after i read your comment that this was the case. WP has fixed problem I understand.
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The same thing happened with me.
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Any solution?
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I dont know. right now I am ignoring because those likes were on a comment on a different profile.
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Hello Marie, I do not know about likes, but you can control who can comment on your posts. There is an option under settings-> writing where you can contro who can comment. You can set it to requires a login and/or email id. Apart from this, you can add those explicit sites under block list.
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Hi. The problem is that the likes are being attached to comments I have made so I can’t find a way to block them like I can with spam comments. I’ve had several urls on the block list for a long time. I don’t see those comments in my notifications but they still show up in my trash folder. WordPress won’t take action to prohibit actions from those urls, even though I have been over this will them on several occasions. So I steady have about 2500 comments in my trash folder that go aways after two weeks now. At one point I had over 20000 at one time. All about car insurance all over the US. I don’t know how many places I can own a car. One is hard enough. :). Sigh.
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Another option is to write to WordPress and let them know about these sites. They might do something about it. 🙂
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I will try that as well. They seem to be random though from Russia (.ru extension) but maybe WordPress could discover the sources.
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