How to handle junk subscriptions?

  • Resolved ClayMontgomery

    (@claymontgomery)


    7 years, 4 months ago

    Hello,

    I just upgraded my WordPress site to use ssl (https) and suddenly I am getting more subscribers, but I think they are junk/spam because the email addresses are mostly “hotmail.net” and “mail.ru” and websites selling things completely unrelated to my business. I think maybe bots are doing this?

    I don’t get much comment spam. Akismet takes care of that. I don’t know where I got the subscribe widget. I guess it came with WordPress or maybe JetPack.

    So, I need some advise. Why do people subscribe like this and what should I do about it?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    Why? Seriously, I have no idea. I have a blog with 312 subscribers. There’s nothing at all interesting there. This is the jetpack subscription widget, so check with them about filtering out folks….

    https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/jetpack

    Thread Starter ClayMontgomery

    (@claymontgomery)

    But surely you do not want your subscribers list to be full of guys in Russia and China trying to sell fake Rolex watches and such?

    Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    Even those guys deserve to see pictures of my cats. ??

    Really, it’s just bots that see a form and fill a form. I don’t much care about subscribers. It’s the folks hammering on the login that bug me. On my server, I also block most russian and chinese and ukranian IP addresses with iptables.

    If you really do need it, try WP SpamShield. It does a pretty good, but sometimes heavy-handed, job of blocking SPAM registrations.

    Having said that, I do agree with Steve in that the registrations by themselves are not a problem. I have a site that has open registrations and there’s a bit over 10,000 “users” in the database. I think two of them are real, but there’s nothing for the bots to do once they register, so they go somewhere else.

    Thread Starter ClayMontgomery

    (@claymontgomery)

    Thanks for the help!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘How to handle junk subscriptions?’ is closed to new replies.