Spam Likes: Alert

Yesterday I left comments on a blogger-friend’s WP site and received back some spam ‘likes’ on my comments overnight – which really annoyed me because this problem also occurred in April this year (from a different WP blog-site).

For all I know, this may be happening to my followers too but no-one has alerted me to it. Its a real hassle trying to get definitive information about what’s going on but I persevered and thought I’d share what I found out – so that if you have the problem you don’t have to go through the search-process I did.

I ended up contacting Akismet directly (they handle the spam-management for WP) and got a reply from a staff member of Automattic:

Hi Liz, you’re not alone. We’ve seen an uptick in reports of “spam likes” today. It’s not possible to prevent all spam, but we are diligent about always improving. In fact we made a few changes today to combat this recent wave of spammers.

Please give it a day or two and let us know if the amount of spam like does not decrease.

I just thought that if you’ve encountered this issue you can at least take some comfort from the fact that they are currently working it.

Kind regards
Liz

PS. If you haven’t encountered this then lucky you! A spam ‘like’ has a dodgy looking site name when it shows up in your notifications and often includes words you don’t particularly want to see. At its most innocent it might be gibberish like this: id532999.zfvdgk.xyz

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Here’s a photo from our winter hoar frost trip earlier this month – a frozen letterbox in a frozen landscape. Just including it to pretty up my post 🙂

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Text and Photo by Liz; Exploring Colour (2018)