I have some basic spam control plug-ins set, but hadn’t noticed that I had over 4500 subscribers with randomly generated looking names.
I deleted about 1500 of them before realizing that I have no way of telling the few real subscribers to maybe come back and re-subscribe if I, uh, delete them first. So. Yeah.
So those of you tucked into the remaining 3000 or so, you will be cut off shortly. I have a new deterrent for the new malicious signups, and will keep on top of the human spammers who get in.
I’m going to set up a very clear blog to email feature plug-in thingy. I have to research them a bit. I have mailchimp but ever since realizing that mailchimp content all ends up in people’s promotions folder at gmail, I have wondered if maybe another solution makes more sense. You would need to dig me out of the ads folder and do something to keep me from always landing in there… this is why nobody does blogs anymore…
WordPress link spam and comment spam is weird and depressing. The degree to which any and all functionality on any sort of website can be hijacked, abused, and used to make criminals a few pennies or so, isn’t something we thought about, back when we dreamed about this global computer network.
Ah. Our dreams. Well, Cyberpunk captures the feel of the present pretty well, actually. Dystopic in many ways.
So I should resubscribe? Or are the spammers just subscribed to random post comments?
What Belfiore said. (hee!)
Also, have you thought about doing a mailing list (free) with all the cross-checks that come with that (captcha, email verification, etc.) instead?
I am working on this now; just found the functionality in mailchimp (hidden under a ‘go to the classic version of this interface which has one tenth the number of features as as such is comprehensible’ button)
So, I think I need to create a few lists, or just merge everyone and let them sort themselves out, and of course, the way to do this is to know what I am doing this for. What is this site for?
Is this the purely social site? It sorta is, now that I think of it… but then should it have this domain name?
Digging to the bottom of this pile of bullshit feels endless. I’ll write a post on this tomorrow.
You don’t need Feedburnergooglygoog to subscribe to this blog. https://www.jayoconnell.com/feed/ is your simple, clean, RSS feed. Plug it into an RSS feed reader, and you’re done. There are standalone readers, app readers for your phone, web-based readers, even readers that will send posts to your email address.
Jay, you might want to publicize the https://www.jayoconnell.com/feed/ address on your front page.