wporg4ssorg

Thanks for your quick response. Sorry I took so long.

After I installed Simple Local Avatars I unchecked Show Avatars and checked Only show local avatars on the WordPress Discussion Settings page. To get rid of Gravatars completely I followed advice from this forum, checked Show Avatars so I could set the Gravatar default to None, then unchecked it again.

The site uses the Essence Theme from Lucid and is hosted on Blhuhost. I assume they installed their respective plugins, which I haven’t changed.

I’m a very experienced programmer in general and with ASP.NET, but I’m a beginner with WordPress and PHP. I’ve found the process of trying to set up a simple, basic WordPress blog difficult and confusing, lost in the flood of plugins insisting they’re necessary and the best, especially if I subscribe. The site is for my sister who was totally lost setting it up. She’d have given up long ago. I don’t want to work at the PHP level, sticking to simple, free plugins to meet her minimal needs for a small, non-commercial, membership site where she can discuss her blog posts with a small, managed group.

Thanks for the help.

The avatar doesn’t show anywhere except as an image in the Media Library, where it’s showing three times, probably from multiple upload attempts. It does not show either in the comments or on the user’s profile page.

The Dashboard At a Glance section says: WordPress 6.5.4 running Essence theme.

Plugins are relatively few and simple:

Contact Form 7

Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

Version 5.9.6 | By?Takayuki Miyoshi?|?View details

Essence Theme Core

Essence theme core plugin.

Version 1.2.1 | By?Lucid Themes?|?Visit plugin site

Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights

The best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. See how visitors find and use your website, so you can keep them coming back.

Version 8.27.0 | By?MonsterInsights?|?View details

LH Archived Post Status

Creates an archived post status. Content can be excluded from the main loop and feed (but visible with a message), or hidden entirely

Version 3.10 | By?Peter Shaw?|?View details

Login or Logout Menu Item

Adds a new Menu item which dynamically changes from login to logout depending on the current users logged in status.

Version 1.2.3 | By cartpauj |?View details

LoginPress

LoginPress is the best?wp-login?Login Page Customizer plugin by?WPBrigade?which allows you to completely change the layout of login, register and forgot password forms.

Version 3.1.0 | By?LoginPress?|?View details?|?Vote!?|?

Noptin - WordPress Newsletter Plugin

A very fast and lightweight WordPress newsletter plugin

Version 3.4.3 | By?Noptin Newsletter?|?View details

Simple Local Avatars

Adds an avatar upload field to user profiles. Generates requested sizes on demand, just like Gravatar! Simple and lightweight.

Version 2.7.10 | By?10up?|?View details

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notifications. It includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts or suspend all notifications.

Version 240119 | By?WPKube?|?View details

The Bluehost Plugin

WordPress plugin that integrates a WordPress site with the Bluehost control panel, including performance, security, and update features.

Version 3.12.0 | By?Bluehost?|?View details

WP Mail SMTP

Reconfigures the?wp_mail()?function to use Gmail/Mailgun/SendGrid/SMTP instead of the default?mail()?and creates an options page to manage the settings.

Version 4.0.1 | By?WP Mail SMTP?|?View details

WPForms Lite

Beginner friendly WordPress contact form plugin. Use our Drag & Drop form builder to create your WordPress forms.

Version 1.8.9.2 | By?WPForms?|?View details

I deleted Jetpack. It’s too complex, intrusive, and confusing. And it inundates me with marketing trying to sell me more services without helping me sort out the ones I need or want.

The best I can tell Jetpack and wordpress.com are so tightly integrated that using the Jetpack newsletter feature makes it useless to have my own registration and takes away my control of who’s using my website.

The best I can tell that makes Jetpack useless to me. It ends up looking like a sales and marketing tool to drag users and money to wordpress.com. It looks like my best plan is to delete it and try to find a different way to have a minimal newsletter to tell my registerd users about new blog posts.

Thanks to those who tried to help.

It sounds like to use Jetpack my users are stuck with a wordpress.com login and my own registration becomes irrelevant. I want control over who can join discussions on my (sister’s) blog, thus using my own registration with my own veto power or user removal. I want users aware only of my registration. Does that boil down to I can’t use Jetpack for new post email notifications because I don’t want wordpress.com to have control or visibility?

Thanks for the response, Gaurav.

I don’t want people to use a wordpress.com login at all, or if such a login is necessary for a feature such as email for new posts or user management of their email choices, I want it to be invisible, so my user is aware only of their registration on my site, Trying to keep it simple for the user. Two logins for my site is not user friendly.

Do I understand correctly that to use the Jetpack subscriber functions users on my site will have to keep track of both their site registration and a wordpress.com login and use the right one at the right time, or just skip their site registration?

I keep asking to clarify because the more I understand the more broken it seems to me. It looks to me like site registration is of little or no value if you want Jetpack features and I therefore can’t really use site registration as one login to use a site with logged-in only commenting and new post newsletter with adding in the wordpress.com login that users have to use.

Have I got that straight?

Bob

I figured I needed to enable worpress.com user matching email with registered site user. I could only enable that by enabling wordpress.com login. Now I get the complicated login page that pushes strong toward using a wordpress.com login. I want users to only be aware of their registered login on our site.

I tried working around that and now the users list for the site says I have to invite all the users to wordpress.com.

I don’t get it. Can I use Jetpack subscriber and newsletter features without having the site’s registered users visibly entangles with wordpress.com to their confusion?

This level of entanglement and confusion is terrible. It’s like I have to just give up and let wordpress.com visibly rule the site for all its own registered users to have to handle. What’s the point of having the site’s own user registration? My intent is to require that and allow no other so the site owner can have tight control of who’s registered and who can participate in discussions.

Thanks, Emily A. You’ve increased my enlightenment.

The articles helped. I now understand why email for comments worked but for new posts didn’t. I was getting the comment emails from base functions and not getting the new post emails because I’d crippled the necessary wordpress.com involvement. I need to go back to options and try to enable that.

There’s so much marketing of plugins and paid services my skepticism kicks in and tries to stay at arm’s length, especially for what seems to me like a minimal, comfortable blog site for users to share blog post discussions, moderated by the owner managing her own site. Working all that out has been difficult for me, a very experienced programmer. It was impossible for my sister who owns the blog.

Thanks again.

Bob

Thanks, Joseph B. That was helpful. Now I have two problems to sort out.

I’d avoided the idea of my site’s locally registered users having a wordpress.com account, believing that was unnecessary and confusing. Sounds like it’s necessary and somewhat automatic, but is it visible to be confusing? I expect the site to be used by people easily confused by layers of complexity. That includes my sister, the site owner and blogger, and her readers. When I installed Jetpack, I was perplexed by the wordpress.com login showing up to confuse users who thought they’d signed up only for my small site.

Having shut off everything that seemed to let wordpress.com intrude and confuse, I now see that I probably shut off exactly what I needed for the the automated emails for new blog posts and comments, although oddly enough the comment-related emails work and the post related don’t It seems half working, which confuses me.

I’ve been a programmer for a very long time, but I get lost in the layers and logins needed to run this website.

Thanks again.

Bob

Thanks for the response, but that’s not quite what I’m looking for.

Jetpack Comments allows users to use social media accounts to comment. I explicitly don’t want that. My current setup allows my logged-in users to comment, which is exactly what I want, and if they’ve checked the box they do indeed get email when someone else comments.

The problem I’m chasing is that the other box they can check on the comment form is to get an email when there’s a new blog post. That email doesn’t happen. Right now that’s the biggest problem keeping the website from going into use.

Also, whichever box they check, they don’t show up in Jetpack’s Subscribers display. I can’t find any way to see who has what boxes checked or to help them get the right one.

No responses. I’ll simplify my question. I’d delete this if I could.

Thanks for the quick, clear response. I’m already set up with wp-mail-smtp. I sorted that one out from all the marketing for more power for more money.

I know the messages aren’t falling in a spam filter because so far I’m my own multiple test users. That’s indeed one of my problems. I can’t tell that the messages are even being sent. I suspect the underlying problem is WordPress.com getting into the process where I don’t need or want it.

When I registered two test users, I got email with links to WordPress.com that were non-functional and would be confusing to the website users. I’m doing this for my sister who would have wasted the money she spent to have a blog, completely lost in language and components far outside her experience.