Thanks for your thoughts about the new sign up process for free users.
First, I would like to point out this wasn’t an effort to ‘squeeze’ more metrics out of users. The reason we did this is simple. We have no way to adequately track the number of sites using Wordfence beyond the download numbers we see. This isn’t a very good way to be able to future plan and make sure we have the bandwidth and servers available to keep providing the plugin and the services it provides to our paid customers and our free customers like you. Requiring the email (which is only for sending you the license) allows us to spend wisely so we can invest where needed. About 90% of our users are using free licenses so it is vital we are able to budget smartly. We’re also not the first plugin in the repository to require this. Akismet does as well if I remember correctly. Intentionally and wisely investing where it is needed now and where it will be needed in the future is what makes us able to continue providing a plugin with fully functional features like our firewall and malware scanner and other free services like our security management tool, Wordfence Central.
I do understand that some users encountered a server issue not to long ago, but as with any service on the web (your websites probably have had this happen too) sometimes things happen and we respond to them if they do.
When looking at the email stats we see that over 97% of the emails sent are marked delivered. That means your mail server said “We received your email!”. Once it gets to your email server we have no control over what happens. Sometimes they wind up in the spam folder. Sometimes your email provider blocks them and you never get them. The emails come from [email protected] so adding that to your allowlist to ensure deliverability might help. For context, 2.11% of the total requests for a free license bounced (no such email address exists). If anyone has an issue they can reach out to us directly at [email protected] where we’ll be happy to see if we can tell exactly what happened.
We also now include a fallback solution, where you can get your license through a link in the popup if the email doesn’t work.
Of course, we understand if providing an email is an issue for you. In that case, we wish you well with whatever security solution you choose to pursue.
Mia
