(Following on from yesterday’s post – this is something I posted elsewhere a few years ago.
It was at the time I was thinking about shutting Still Waters down)
First published 2015.
Now June 2022, reading current comments it seems nothing has changed.
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There are so many ways to communicate with others these days
Instagram – Twitter – Facebook – Blogs are just a few
And this is where I start with no idea of where I’m going or where I’ll finish😊
I do have accounts on all of those with minimal……in fact no personal information apart from a photo in my public profile. You’d probably glean a bit about me from reading the blog avatar.
My personal fb account was to allow me to join craft (and other) groups, a few family and friends ‘found’ me and apart from newly discovered extended family…(discovered via family research sites)…I don’t go around asking others if I can be their ‘friend’.
Anyway about a year ago I kept getting ‘friend requests’ on this account – the odd thing was these were from strange men as well as male members of armed forces (soldiers sailors airmen – in uniform with rank displayed) Obviously those requests were deleted.
Then the same thing happened on twitter – a medium I used for a while for various reasons but haven’t looked at for well over a year. Lots of messages saying ‘so and so is now following you’ Once again strange very well built men, many with no tweets recorded but following loads of women Oh and also those new followers included women whose profiles described them as ‘se^xy’ looking for fun! It took a while for me (not the most tech savvy person) to find the way to block them, unfollow people and sites I no longer had any interest in and to decide to make the account private.
My (rarely used) Instagram account was getting the same treatment so that went private as well….that didn’t actually stop them – they just put in follow requests
Then there were the strange ridiculous and at times confronting comments that were arriving on the blog. They came in clusters thankfully stopping for some reason towards the end of last year. Luckily they didn’t all make it onto the blog proper- w/press scooped them up as they arrived and put them into spam folder for me to decide yea or nay.
So after a break I start writing on Still Waters again and blow me down if I don’t start getting emails informing me – ‘people with very strange names @ outlook’ – have become followers. I consulted the help forums and lo and behold I’m not the only one getting them………WordPress were aware and were trying to (not sure what) do something about it.
I then discovered a feature available in the settings of my w/press blog There is a way to remove/delete followers. You learn something new every day
I thought it was only the other party who could do that – you couldn’t block a follower.
So armed with this knowledge I went through my followers list checking their ‘credentials’ and deleting an enormous amount. Most of whom were unknown to me. People who hadn’t blogged for years, people whose blogs were closed/deleted, bloggers from online courses never to be heard from since, others from ‘financial’ sites or travel places – you know all those people who follow because you wrote about something once (but never again) I will admit to feeling a bit better once that had been done and of course if I’ve removed a live reader they can always refollow.
OK everyone, come on and help me here. Am I the only one to have gone through all this rubbish – was I naive in thinking all those things couldn’t happen to me? For a while there I even wondered if my name had been entered on a dating agency’s books
Public blogs are like open jars of jam waiting for nasties and other strange things to fly in and ‘spoil’ the taste so I can’t complain.
However I’m curious to know about other people’s experiences with followers on those other sites.
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First published (elsewhere) 2015.
Now June 2022, reading current comments it seems nothing has changed.
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