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.