WELL THAT WAS INTERESTING

This morning I woke up to find my reading list bombarded with a dozen or so posts from someone I definitely was not following. It was someone I would have considered  spam. They were selling a long list of how-to books. 

How on earth did they get there and how to get rid of them?  It took a lot of frustrating trial and error plus searching Google for maybe someone else in my boat who had found relief. 

Finally I found the answer.  It seems when people quit blogging for a long period, some one else can take their URL and run with it. That entitles them access to all those who had originally followed that former owner. 

So I went hunting and realized I had a ton of dormant bloggers. Not knowing how to find the culprit, I just started un-following dormant accounts. 

To do this I clicked on the star to the far right of my blog reading list, "Manage Your blog list."  Then I clicked on "settings" beside the dormant account which will allow you to un-follow. 

Perhaps an easier way would have been to click on each of them to see if that took me to the invader's site. However, I figured I'd best get rid of all the old dormant ones to keep it from happening again. 

I hope in my zeal, I did not un-follow any of my current buddies by accident. 

It might be good policy to police your long dormant bloggers periodically.  I plan to. 

Good luck and hope this helps someone.

I am suspending comments for this post only as this is meant as an FYI-- for your information.