Right from the first day, I have always allowed people or organisations to follow me without hindrance. I always thought that the point of a blog was to maximise the number of readers and subscribers. That was until recently. I don’t always follow back and don’t always look at their site either. Earlier this week, I noticed that I had a follower that appeared to be offering blogging advice and tips. Always on the lookout to improve, I thought I would take a look at their site. Clicking on the link at the top of one of their posts, opened up my browser with a warning message that the site was unsafe. Being the over-cautious one that I am, I quickly closed it down. I then removed subscriber from my reader list and breathed a sigh of relief. I also noticed that a couple of subscribers no longer had a ‘clickable’ by their name/site name and I removed these also.
So, the advice I’m looking for is: should I enable the Blog by Email option on my site? Does it deter the casual reader? Is it worth it for the number of subscribers that I get? Is it actually any safer?
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From the keyboard of Tony 
I don’t think the email one is any safer and it most likely will deter people if they can’t follow easily via WordPress. But there is no harm in enabling that too. In general, WordPress people use the normal options (either through a widget or through the Reader) and the others use the email option.
I never used to mind who followed me, but recently after reading posts from people having trouble with ‘fake’ followers, I’ve started to remove the odd site I find that is obviously not blogging in what I think of as the right spirit. I also remove any who follow me just to reblog my posts without adding their own comment hoping they will forget about me that way and not be prompted to reblog.
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Thanks for commenting Susan. As I understand it, the Blog by Email option means that follower has to ‘request’ to follow you by signing up by email. I’m going to check with support that that’s the case though.
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I’m not sure it still works quite the same as it used to. One day the ones I had followed by e-mail seemed to stop arriving that way, although perhaps I had inadvertently pressed something.
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I have always allowed the follow by email option as well as any others available for people to follow me. The point you made with the fake followers is quite an eyeopener. I do tend to follow back if their blog interests me, so shops and other so-called help sites etc I just ignore. I don’t mind if they follow me though.
You could try with the email side though.
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