Just a quick note to let people know that there has been a lot of spam on WordPress this weekend. I noticed that many of the comment likes (NOT post likes) had comments from .ru addresses. These were on comment likes on my posts and also those I had made on other people’s posts. This issue is not confined to me. I have been in contact with the WP team and they were looking into the problem at the time.
I have switched off comment likes for all of my blogs for the moment until I am sure the problem has been sorted. You can still like a post and comment as usual.
It isn’t possible to remove likes or prevent someone from liking posts (or comments), however you can turn likes on or off for individual posts or pages.
You would do this by clicking on ‘Sharing’ in your post/page editor settings menu, and checking or unchecking the relevant boxes.
If you want to turn off comment likes for ALL posts then go to My Sites / Configure / Sharing / Buttons / Options and uncheck the Comment Likes for All Posts box.
Another spamming problem is coming from @outlook.com and @yahoo.com addresses. Flooding posts and comments. Fortunately Akismet seems to be capturing them, but you might want to check your spam folders and delete them. I regularly check my comments and the spam folders in case someone I know has slipped through. Today I had 470 comments in there including one from a friend who has a hotmail address. And don’t worry if you find thousands, the spam comments automatically get deleted after 30 days.
If you are getting loads of emails then you might want to change the settings in your notifications for your blog(s). To do this click on the notifications bell and then the little cog wheel. You can then decide what notifications you want to receive by email.
Spam is annoying and let’s hope WP can get to the bottom of this recent spate. It’s not easy. So please have sympathy for the engineers. They will be doing everything they can to resolve these issues.
TRAVEL WORDS 
The spammers have gravatars that can be reported by each of you, then they will be removed from that feature. Meanwhile WP is doing their best to find a way to block these websites which are not WP sites. In my WP settings I blocked comments form any URLs with the word sex in them.
Don’t panic and hold onto your towel.
You are right Sherry that you can block comments by key words, but not likes on comments unfortunately.
Thanks for the information, Jude
Hopefully it is fixed now. Until the next time.
Well, indeed….
Thanks a lot for your useful advices.
You are most welcome.
A problem for sure. But so are the serial pests who go around liking my comments on other people’s posts in the hope of getting me to look at their site. Someone who is a “talkaholic” liked 12 of my comments in 2 minutes once. I’m sure you’ve encountered them as well.
I have indeed. Wasn’t sure if that was a real person or also a bot of some kind.
So I’m not the only one who noticed this on the weekend. I didn’t have anything in my spam folder though, just the weird likes. No way to remove them. I’m going to turn off all comment likes too.
Best for now, until it is fixed.
I don’t really need comment likes anyway, so they can stay off. It’s a good idea to revisit settings occasionally. When I looked, I updated a few other things too.
Me too. I switched off most email notifications as I don’t really need those either.
My first blog was spammed to pieces but I was too green to know what was going on. Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been offline all weekend but I’ll check my end. 🙂
I’ve had one grotty email address following and liking, they need to get a life.
Well you are very lucky 🙂 I saw dozens!
Last year for a while, and again recently, I’ve gotten fake subscribers with e-mail addresses containing @outlook.com. I don’t understand what the spammers hope to gain by that.
If you respond then they gain a genuine email address that they can use. Something on those lines.
Yeah that’s happened to me as well recently!!!
The fake subscriptions from addresses containing @outlook.com has continued. When a new subscriber has a blog I occasionally check it out but I would never reply when all that’s offered is an e-mail address.
I remove any ‘followers’ that only have an email address.
Just be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water. I have some legitimate subscribers without blogs of their own who therefore had to subscribe with an e-mail address.
Thanks for the heads up. So far I’ve not been affected, but forewarned is forearmed as they say.
I think they are still working on it, but as I have turned off comment likes I don’t see anything.
We had the same problem. “.Ru sexy post” liking every comment made on our posts and lots of comments like “!!”. Thank you for taking this up, it was helpful to read your advice and all the comments. Hope Wp has sorted it out now. I think they have, less spam now. X