Where have my email followers gone? Help!!!
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Hi there
My blog http://www.mainstreamtj.wordpress.com says I have 718 followers (it says this on the front page near the box where people enter their email to follow the blog).A follower recently contacted me and told me he was no longer receiving the email of the blog posts in his inbox even though he used to.
So I went to the ‘People’ part of my admin site and it only says I have about 200 people following by email (not 718) and his email is not there. I also have about 40 people following via wordpress. So this does not add up!!!
I then tried to add my friend back on by inviting him but it says that email is already registered!!
Hmmm
Ideas?
Thanks!The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
The follower count in the follow widget shows both WordPress.com followers, and also followers for any services you have connected via Publicize. The People section of the dashboard only shows confirmed email followers and people following via their WordPress.com accounts.
In your case, 405 of your followers are from your Twitter account. Then I see 40 WordPress.com followers, meaning people who clicked Follow while logged into their own WordPress.com accounts, and 274 email only followers. I also see 62 pending followers, meaning those are people who added their email in the follow widget, but they haven’t confirmed yet by clicking the link in the email we send out.
You can see all these numbers for yourself by going to My Site ->Stats and clicking on the Insights tab. If you scroll down on that page you’ll see the Followers module.
Does your friend have a WordPress.com account? If so, you won’t see him under your email followers, but you should see him under WordPress.com followers. If he wants to receive email notifications he needs to go to the Reader and click Edit next to Blogs I Follow. There he can enable email notifications for your site.
He should also check his notification settings that he didn’t accidentally block email notification from WordPress.com:
https://wordpress.com/me/notifications/subscriptions/
If he does not have a WordPress.com account but is an email only follower, please reply with the email address (the forum will hide it, but I’ll be able to see it) and I can check for you.
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Hi there
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly and with such good (and understandable info. You truly live up to your Happiness Engineer title!
I checked and my friend does not have a WordPress.com account as he is not under my WordPress.com followers
He is an email follower and his email is (email visible only to moderators and staff)
On the issue of the 62 pending followers, is there some way I can remind them to confirm their invite?
Thanks so much again for your excellent help
Cheers
Pauline -
It seems that your friend’s subscription to your site is pending. I’m afraid I don’t have an explanation for why they would have become unsubscribed in the first place – we only keep logs for email addresses connected to WordPress.com accounts. But if he approves the subscription in the email we sent yesterday he should receive notifications again.
Alternatively he can go to the subscription management page and check on pending subscriptions for his email address there:
On the issue of the 62 pending followers, is there some way I can remind them to confirm their invite?
There is no way to view pending email followers on your site at this stage, so it’s not possible to reach out to those people directly.
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Hello
Thanks once again I will follow up on my friend to see if he got the email you sent yesterday and hopefully we can get him back on.Regarding the other 62 pending followers, that is a really high miner of pendinga givem the size of my follower (like 1/4 or so). I suspect like my friend David there has been a glitch where a whole bunch of them have become Unsubscribed. The challenge is that you/I can’t see who they are and they may not know because they might just presume I have not sent any blogs so might not notice they are not receiving them!!! A challenge indeed!!! Any ideas?
Thanks for your help
Pauline -
Your site’s logs don’t show that any followers have been removed by our system, so I don’t think that’s the problem. Rather, I suspect David might have clicked the unsubscribe link in the email by mistake, causing him to be removed. To clarify, we do keep logs for actions taken on your site by you or by our system, but if David somehow removed himself that won’t show in your site’s logs – that would show in his account’s logs, if he had a WordPress.com account.
As for the pending followers, those are people who never confirmed their subscriptions when they first subscribed, some up to two years ago. In other words, those people have never received updates from your site. It’s not possible to set an existing subscriber back to pending.
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Hello
That all makes sense re the pendings. No problem.Re my friend David …he said he got your email and he writes …”I tried to fill it out and they said my yahoo email was already taken! So I couldn’t re register it ! :(“
Any ideas?
Thanks so much
Pauline -
If he goes to the subscribe.wordpress.com page I linked before he should be able to confirm the subscription from there, or otherwise cancel the pending subscription so he can try to subscribe again. I can also cancel the pending subscription from my side, but it’s better if he’s able to do it himself.
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Hello again
Looks like your suggestion has worked! Thanks so much for all your help.
Really appreciate it
Regards
Pauline -
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