Spam Users

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  xmetman · Member · Feb 10, 2022 at 11:56 am

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  How can I get rid of spam users that repeatedly subscribe as users to my site?
  I have been told to uncheck the ‘anyone can register’ option but believe that will stop genuine subscribers from registering.

  WP.com: Unknown
  Jetpack: Yes
  Correct account: Yes

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to moderators and staff)

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  kokkieh · Staff · Feb 10, 2022 at 1:13 pm

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  Hi there,

  The “Anyone can register” setting in Settings ->General in WP-Admin controls the guest-user role in WordPress. For example, if you had an ecommerce or a membership site, that’s the option you need to allow people to register customer/member accounts on the site.

  But it has nothing to do with blog subscriptions. Your site uses WordPress.com’s blog subscription service via the Jetpack plugin to allow people to subscribe to email notifications to new posts on your site.

  There is no way to prevent a specific person from subscribing to a site using WordPress.com/Jetpack. You can only switch off the subscription feature entirely so no one can subscribe to your site any more. That wouldn’t prevent anyone from following your site directly via its RSS feed or in the WordPress.com Reader, though.

  You can find details about disabling Jetpack’s subscriptions module here:

  Jetpack

  Could you perhaps share why you want to block these subscribers?

  There is no possible way someone can harm or compromise your site by signing up for notifications on your new posts. New post notification emails are sent from WordPress.com’s servers, not yours, so it has no impact at all on your site’s resource use on your hosting provider’s servers. These subscribers are just passive recipients of your site’s content, same as someone following your site’s RSS feed in a feed reader.

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  xmetman · Member · Feb 10, 2022 at 1:46 pm

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  Hi

  Thanks for the information about the ‘anyone can register’ checkbox.

  We’ll have to agree to disagree on your notion that these are just ‘passive recipients’ to my mind they are spam and I get hundreds of them each month.

  As an example:-

  Why would a user called trisharicks201 with an email address (email visible only to moderators and staff) wants to read the latest post on a village WordPress site in the Highlands of Scotland?

  Bruce.

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  fstat · Staff · Feb 10, 2022 at 3:10 pm

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  Hi Bruce,

  I get what you’re saying and I have to agree that those types of users are not genuinely interested in your site. They just follow your site in hope that you’ll follow theirs back. This is a common practice on the internet that is happening on other platforms and social media sites.

  We have mechanisms in place to ensure that those types of accounts don’t get out of hand and generate any spam. For example, if someone follows too many sites at once, then we automatically block them.