Subscriber Spam

it’s the curse of the internet i’m afraid. you can do all sorts of things to cut it down but you’ll never get rid of it. it’s all automated and so it’s relentless.

you’ve got some plugins in place to help with it, maybe try wordfence, it’s an industrial standard plugin for safeguarding your site. it’s not an unbreakable dam but it’s pretty damn robust!

Hi Jack I have wordfence.. I am upwards 30 fake subscribers a day this is very annoying..

if those aren’t working then maybe try: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-spamshield/ and see if that makes a difference. you may have to disable the other plugins for this to work (maybe not, but as it’s doing the same thing as those other plugins it might not be happy)

Thank you Jack I just installed it I will see what happens thanks again for helping :-0)

One quick question, why do you have registration open on your site? Or, what do you hope to achieve with it? Please note that even though the role is named “Subscriber,” WordPress itself doesn’t do anything with these users, and all they can do is just edit their profile: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Roles_and_Capabilities#Subscriber

(For some short backstory, many many years ago the WordPress developers created a severely limited user role that plugins could make use of if they didn’t want to manage their own user system. They chose the name Subscriber since subscription plugins seemed most likely. To date though, only one subscription plugin uses WordPress’s user system, the rest use their own user system.)

I mention this because quite a few folks leave registration open, collect pretty much nothing but bot spam accounts, and don’t even know why they have it open in the first place (or aren’t aware that their subscription plugin uses its own separate user system). If that sounds like you, don’t worry you’re amongst good company, and you can disable registration at Settings -> General in your site’s Dashboard.

If you do need registration for something on your site that you are actively aware uses WordPress’s user system, definitely try the plugin that Jack mentioned above. If that doesn’t help either, try this one: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

Hi you lost me a while back. But in short my subscriber is open so that anyone that wants to subscribe to my blog can. But they can’t and will not receive anything from me until I approve them. Its just annoying needing to delete all these things so I can get to the real approvals if there are any real ones.. I want people to be able to read and comment on my blog whenever they want too. I am also not aware of the two separate user systems. But I do want people (valid) people to register whenever ??

What plugin are you using to send the subscriptions?

Its a JetPack plug in where it allows comments to come through FB, WP, or Blogger you can see it on my blog curvygirlsarechic.com

Ah, good. Jetpack definitely *does not* use WordPress’s users system for subscriptions, it uses its own system which you manage at https://wordpress.com/people under your connected WordPress.com account.

So, all those people registering as Subscribers on your site itself, visible in the Users section of your Dashboard? They aren’t getting anything, as mentioned earlier, because Jetpack doesn’t use that system.

You can safely delete all of the Subscribers in the Users section of your Dashboard, and disable Registration at Settings -> General in your Dashboard.

Next, none of the plugins here will block subscribers registering with Jetpack, again because it uses its own system, so you can safely remove any anti-registration-spam plugins you installed from this thread (they aren’t needed since you switched off WordPress’s registration system).

Finally, to allow people to properly register for subscriptions through Jetpack, see https://jetpack.com/support/subscriptions/

Hi James some of what you said kind of went over my head but anyway the last link you sent me for the plug in definitely worked I don’t see any thing beyond the May 26th date. Thanks again ??

You’re welcome!

I have a spin on this problem. I have found that some subscribers are somehow posting on my site, and it’s total junk ads. How in the world is a subscriber posting? I have no plugins installed that remotely let this happen. I have looked on this site for hours for the location as to where I can check the permissions for the user “subscriber”

Something is very wrong, subscribers should not be able to post.

@smallstar67 – This topic is 10 months old and already marked as Resolved. It’s unlikely that anyone is monitoring this topic and posting here does not “bump” it to the top of the list. Per the Forum Guidelines please start your own topic instead. Thanks.
https://make.www.ads-software.com/support/handbook/forum-welcome/#post-in-the-best-place

I’ve been looking on this site for a while. The design seems to be to lead a person around in circles, never getting to a place where a new tread can be started.

You can start a new topic at the bottom of any of the forums. For this forum here is a link:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/#new-post