What is your criteria for identifying "followers that, judging by the content (or lack thereof) on their own websites, have no reason to follow [your] blog."

Which brings back the point that if you're concerned over who is reading your blog, a public blog is probably not for you.

I am not concerned about who is reading my blog. I am concerned about the amount of time that I have had to spend every day for the past two months or so reporting commercial spam followers, and spam followers that, judging by the content (or lack thereof) on their own websites, have no reason to follow my blog.

As others have stated in this and other threads, WordPress allows us to approve comments before they appear on our blogs. It would be extremely helpful to be able to do the same with follows.

If you receive a spam comment, just mark it as spam so Akismet (our learning anti-spam system) can adapt to new spam trends.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/unwanted-comments/

http://en.support.wordpress.com/feeds/

Which brings back the point that if you're concerned over who is reading your blog, a public blog is probably not for you.

We are collecting and analyzing the data to find the best way to identify and combat spam followers without inconveniencing legitimate followers. This won't be a quick fix.

Similarly, just because a follower has an empty blog themselves doesn't mean that they aren't a human being interested in reading your blog.

No, it doesn't, but given the similarities between many of the empty blogs that I am getting follows from, I can't help but suspect that they are being set up just to get hits or scrapes.

Gravatar is nothing more than an avatar service, a way to tie an image to your email address across many sites. Just because a profile has an image and no content doesn't mean it's spam. Similarly, just because a follower has an empty blog themselves doesn't mean that they aren't a human being interested in reading your blog.

If they have a spam blog, then please report that, as they are most definitely a spam follower. If all they have is a Gravatar profile, there's still a good chance that it's a legitimate follower, unless of course the profile is filled with spam links.

1. The only thing a follower can do is read your blog, nothing else, so let's please not refer to this as a security issue. If you consider someone reading your blog to be a security issue, having a public blog is probably not for you.

2. Folks need to have a WordPress.com account to use the Reader, but we don't force them to use their account beyond that. Judging by activity which appears to be legitimate (not following hundreds of blogs a day) and direct contact, there are plenty of legitimate followers with empty or abandoned blogs.

3. If you visit the follower's blog and it truly is spam content (not just empty or abandoned, see 2 above), please report it following this guide: http://en.support.wordpress.com/report-blogs/

All of the sudden, I am now getting fake email sign-ups on my blog. I've disabled the follow blog button. I tried to delete subscribers, but you can't (as several people have already pointed out).

Hope the issue can be resolved. It is frustrating to have skewed numbers and also to allow people with fake emails to follow posts. It does worry me that there might be a pending security issue.

I appreciate that I can report abuse - but I've gotten 20 new followers, (all spammers on examination) in the last 3 days. So now I have this chore to do of having to go and report them all. (Maybe I'm being a baby about it...but it's really a bit of a pain!!)

As I believe somebody else already said, worrying about this, for me, seriously degrades the experience of blogging on WordPress...which is a huge shame! Up until now, I've been extremely pleased with the whole experience of blogging on this platform.

I REALLY think we should have the ability to block followers.

However, things got a little frustrating with all this, so after enabling the email widget back on, I decided to not receive anymore email notifications upon subscriptions. Strange enough, even with email widget on, I have not seen an addition of new email subscribers, fake or legitimate, in more than a week. I am checking subscribers through the Stats page. My last email subscriber looks legitimate but it was a week ago. My blog generally gets new subscribers on frequent basis.

God only knows what's been happening with WordPress spam issues lately. WordPress support probably does not realize that bloggers hosting here, don't necessarily have luxury of time and energy to look after these behind-the-scenes bugs and issues.

I do hope my question is addressed, since I was told privacy was why we stopped receiving notifications for email (non-Wordpress) followers.

I have been wondering about a motive for the spam email followers. Is it possible they can be collecting email addresses from those who send out emails to thank those who are now following their blog?

I have a question... Some time ago I came to the forum asking why I no longer received notification for email followers. I was told privacy reasons. So are these recent notifications actually sent out by WordPress?

What's your point, and why are you bothering to grind a history lesson about something everyone following this thread already knows?

When you say "we already knew" -- you mean, who, exactly?

A Like provides a link back to the Liker’s Gravatar profile, which could be filled with marketing links and such, just like a spam comment but with no words.

When we started digging into this, we found certain WordPress.com users somehow Liking hundreds (sometimes thousands) of posts in the span of an hour, often within seconds of publication. In short, there’s no way that they were reading the posts to begin with.

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/why-cant-i-like-anyones-posts/page/2?replies=37

I'm glad we are finally being taken seriously! Many of us here deep-check links and LIKES and Followers on an hourly level that Staff may not have the time or resources to abide.

We're the canaries in the mine. When we start piping up here before our deaths, it's good to get noticed of our alerts. SMILE!

There has to be a reason for it, and if there's a reason, there should be a solution. People are beginning to blog about the problem, it's so bad.

We need to have the ability to block followers. Their "right" to follow whomever they please should not supercede our right to control our own blog. The pleasure of blogging at WordPress is being seriously degraded.