People

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  jennymonds · Member · May 22, 2020 at 5:59 pm

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  I have 4 email followers on my new blog, + 1 WordPress follower. But I also have 37 team members, what does team member mean? Thanks

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  fstat · Staff · May 23, 2020 at 10:20 am

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  Hi there,

  That depends on their role. You can see what each role is capable of here:

  https://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/

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  jennymonds · Member · May 23, 2020 at 10:39 am

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  I haven’t assigned anyone else any roles.
  If I look under the WordPress.com stats and click on people, I get these headings.
  Team Followers Email Followers Invites

  If I click on team there is a list of 37 user names which it says are subscribers. I can’t work out what the difference is between subscribers and followers, or between followers and email followers. I had a notification when the email followers signed up, but I didn’t know about the subscribers until I found the heading in the stats.

  Great if someone could explain! Thank you.

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  fstat · Staff · May 23, 2020 at 3:06 pm

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  A subscriber is the same thing as a follower. Those users can only view your site and leave comments.

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  jennymonds · Member · May 23, 2020 at 3:18 pm

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  Sorry to be completely thick, but this is all new to me. What would the subscribers have done to become subscribers? (I know the followers filled out the form).

  Can’t anyone view the site and leave comments, without being a subscriber?

  Thanks!

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  staff-mckluskey · Staff · May 24, 2020 at 8:25 am

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  If your site is public, everyone can see it and, if the comment feature is enabled, they would also be able to leave comments.

  Have you sent out any invitations or migrated the subscribers from another WordPress site?

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  jennymonds · Member · May 24, 2020 at 9:32 am

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  Yes it’s public, and I haven’t sent out any invitations, and I haven’t had another WordPress sire.

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  staff-mckluskey · Staff · May 24, 2020 at 3:08 pm

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  They also might have subscribed to your site’s RSS feed, however, as @fstat mentioned, subscriber and follower is really the same so nothing you should worry about :)

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  jennymonds · Member · May 24, 2020 at 5:05 pm

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  OK thanks. It’s nice to know there are more people following than I thought there were!

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  kokkieh · Staff · May 25, 2020 at 6:47 am

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  Hi there,

  Just a correction here – a subscriber is not the same thing as a follower. Not on a self-hosted WordPress site like https://jennymonds.com/ which you have connected here via Jetpack.

  Followers in the People tab of your site refer to WordPress.com accounts who are following your site via the WordPress.com Reader. Email followers refer to people without WordPress.com accounts, who signed up to follow your site via email notifications only, using the Jetpack blog subscription widget on your site.

  “Subscribers” is a default user role of the WordPress software, but those people are not actually subscribed to your site in the sense of receiving updates of new posts.

  You have those subscribers because your site currently allow guest user registrations: if you go to https://jennymonds.com/wp-login.php and select the option to log in with a username and password, you’ll see a Register link on that screen that allows you to register an account on the site itself. Some plugins, like online shopping plugins or membership plugins, make use of this guest user role, but it has no connection at all to Jetpack subscriptions.

  You’ll see those subscribers if you go to WP-Admin ->Users ->All Users.

  They’re able to sign up because you have the Guest Registration option switched on under Settings ->General. If you switch it off there, people will no longer be able to create guest accounts on your site.

  For more questions about this particular feature, please ask at https://wordpress.org/support/forums/ instead.