I use the wonderful service on WordPress.com to discover other bloggers and topics of interest so that I may engage in our ever expanding social media site, WordPress.com. I think the Reader service they offer is great and leads to positive results for all involved in blogging in the way of likes, comments, and subscribing to new WordPress based sites that interest us.
We have helped to build a solid community. More importantly we have helped WordPresss.com and each other discovering new blogs from the conceptually uncontroversial to the way far deep end as far as subject matter.
WordPress.com is a wonderful service and ever since interacting with it my engagement count has increased significantly in ways previously mentioned above.
On the downside, when a service such as WordPress.com in it’s continual growth and outreach eventually a bad player will enter the market and attempt to use the service as a means for self indulgence and growth.
In this case a user will create a site on WordPress.com for the express purpose of attempting to insert spam and scam advertising in our comments, replies, and/or contact entry points with a poor attempt at spreading reckless and unwanted information into our feeds.
Fortunately WordPress.com and it’s CMS (content management system) has become a stable, useful, and resilient application and depending on the plugins and inherent strengths built into the WordPress application these types of unwanted messaging are quickly caught and dealt with. I personally utilize the Wordfence plugin (though the discovery was not made through this particular plugin) for in general security of my WordPress site and rely on the built in conventions of WordPress to catch such unwelcome messaging. In this case I was alerted by the “comments” subsystem.
Recently a user by the moniker of “dogdad87” has attempted to spread unwanted advertising spam into my comments feed. An innocuous message was commented on one of my blog posts months ago and then within the last couple of days a couple of comment messages of spam advertisements appeared in my feed which were allowed to be auto-posted because I had approved a post by the person at an earlier point in time.
Now it’s possible the user is not at fault and is a case of a hacked account. However as a precautionary measure I have removed all his comments, and made sure he was not among the 80 or so subscribers who occasionally enjoy the things I write.
This is the first time I have needed to write such an article. I will use this article as boilerplate for other possible spam content in the future and will have a list of bad users or possibly hacked WordPress.com accounts at the end of this article.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
—
Bad User Discoveries on WordPress.com
USER SITE EMAIL
dogdad87 pomeraninanianpuppies.uk dogdad87@proton.me
This is a very informative and well-written post. It’s a shame that spammers try to exploit such a great platform like WordPress. I’m glad to hear that the WordPress CMS and plugins like Wordfence help mitigate these issues. Thanks for sharing your experience and for keeping the community informed.
Thank you. I wasn’t sure how the article would be received. I actually impressed myself on that short article because I thought it was well written and succinct; the article just flowed really well I thought, unlike articles I usually write. I hope to grow as a writer so that I may someday be able to write fluently, engagingly, but most importantly self satisfyingly. In this vein I think writers will get better by simply reading a lot, finding articles and authors I admire, then studying those writings. But I’m getting off topic. Thank you for the reply. I’m going to make it over to your site and read through an article that interests me. I engage with everyone on wordpress.com and I like back, comment back, and subscribe back to anyone who does the same for me. Our WordPress community has been growing steadily and someday I hope to see it the premier site where the best freelance writers write.
Well lol, maybe not the “premier” site, but “a” site people look to for original, well written, and maybe not so mainstream subject matter. Even eccentric, odd, or different writings conveying intense joy and happiness. Even writings rumored to have mocked humanity with overwhelming hate and divisiveness which eventually led to…
Informative post