Fake Subscribers?
I just had a rather interesting experience with one of my websites.
I have it set up, so I get notified when anyone subscribes. Today I got 2 emails back to bac. Normally this would be delightful. Today, these emails did not quite sit right.
As you can see, the domains of email addresses that subscribed are almost identical, and certainly not from any legit domain I am aware of.
So, I went into the site and checked them out. You can find your subscribers in Users. You can sort the complete list by role. I clicked on Subscribers and found both emails.
Because I didn’t feel right about them, I deleted both. If they are legit (which they probably are not) I hope they resub.
While I was there, I noticed another duplicate email with different usernames. For good measure, I deleted those too.
I don’t know if subs can do anything to negatively effect our sites, but better safe than sorry,
Lesson: Pay attention to those subscriber emails.
Learned.
Take care,
Gwendolyn J
Recent Comments
19
I have never seen anything like that. But I’m sure it can be fixed as @KC1953 advices
Good luck
I did go ahead and install that plugin. I'm going to put it on all of my sites because that's just too annoying. I don't have time for that nonsense.
Gwendolyn J
I had that problem a while back and Cristina (cld111) told me how to fix it.
Go into your Wordpress dashboard, then go to:
Users --> All Users
You can delete those registrations there.
Then go to Settings --> General
And where it says "New User Default Role" make sure that says subscriber.
You can also uncheck "Anyone can register".
That fixed the issue for me. Hope that helps
I have it defaulted to Subscriber, but I really have no way to build an email list right now, so I left the Anyone Can Subscribe checked. I think I might change it though. This is getting annoying.
I hear ya! Scammers and spammers get rather tedious after a while. I just got an email from someone posing as FedEx wanting me to update an address because they couldn't deliver to the address I had put on the package.
The only thing is...I haven't sent anything! lol
Anytime I receive something like that I get rid of it immediately you did the right thing.
I have been getting them on emails and then a second email telling me they have changed their password?
I have also checked and could not find anything on them in WA.
I think WP assigns a dummy password when they sub. I added a guest poster to mine, and it did it then.
Considering the thing is well over 12 characters of nonsense, I can see why they would change it. It's not like they can log in thru WA like we do :).
But I will be investigating that further as well. Thanks.
Gwendolyn J
Hi Gwendolyn, this looks like form spam to me. You can counteract it with a reCaptcha to keep the bots and gremlins out.
Cal
I'm trying to cut down on plugins actually. I even switched themes so I could drop NinjaForms and the reCaptcha plugins for Everest, which includes reCaptcha.
They did not comment, so it didn't catch them. I will be going over the site to see if I can pare down a bit more and add that in.
Thanks for the advice
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In my traini8ng the other day on comments came across this, they look like spam to me, and should be deleted as you have done. If I remember correctly the training was in SAC Month Three.