Dramatic increase in spam signups

  • Resolved janerette

    (@janerette)


    7 years, 6 months ago

    Hi, I use Premium on one site and Free on the other. This problem affects both websites. It’s been a problem for the Free website for a while, and now it’s blowing up on my Premium site. My Facebook ad spend is not a lot so I don’t have a lot of traffic. I do have a lot of spam signups.

    Spam signups come from domains like getemailsonline.com and a few that have the format like @word.domain.com which, of course, always point to a folder with a cgi-bin if you just enter the domain on your Address bar.
    Sometimes the names match for the ones they enter and their email address, but not always.

    Typically they come in through Mailing List but recently they started subscribing on a page I advertised on Facebook.

    I have Double Opt-in checked. I have WP Bruiser installed.

    They’re subscribing, getting my welcome email, and half the time they click all the links in the email within the same minute. These are absolutely bots.

    I’m getting tired of cleaning them out. They’re just a pointless waste of time. I need to get a best practices or some kind of code implementation to get rid of these fake people.

    Can you help?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter janerette

    (@janerette)

    7 years, 6 months ago

    Bump – I know it’s American Thanksgiving but I don’t know if you’re American.

    I have a low tolerance for frustration, and this is something I can’t solve by myself. I need help and because my Mailchimp isn’t a paid-for account (two lists with ≤200 members), I cannot get help from them. I am about to turn off the list notifications entirely because seeing yet another email talking about subscriptions that I know are spammers is really getting me down.

    I don’t know why I can’t black-list email addresses at Mailchimp, and I don’t know why these people have made a cottage industry out of harassing list owners with bot signups. I’m sure there’s stuff I don’t know how to do here, and I’m sure there’s also a way to stop them from signing up, even if it hasn’t been written yet.

    I DO NOT want a recaptcha, but if I have to put one on, then I want to be confident I can take the double-opt-in off (make things complicated for people to sign up and they won’t)

    Plugin Contributor Harish Chouhan

    (@hchouhan)

    7 years, 6 months ago

    Hello,

    Thanks for reaching out to us.

    Please note that if you have “Double Opt-in” enabled and yet people/bots are confirming their email and signing up then there is nothing much we can do from our end. You can add “Recaptcha” but just adding recaptcha and turning off “Double Opt-in” would not help. If the bots are verifying their email address by clicking on the link sent by MailChimp, then just having captcha won’t be useful at all.

    You can use the code at https://github.com/ibericode/mc4wp-snippets/blob/master/forms/blacklist-email-addresses.php and modify it to block a certain domain name.

    Plugin Contributor Harish Chouhan

    (@hchouhan)

    7 years, 6 months ago

    Hello,

    There have been no replies to this topic, so I’m marking this as resolved. Please do let us know if you’re still experiencing an issue.

    Thread Starter janerette

    (@janerette)

    7 years, 6 months ago

    Hi there,

    I took a look at the above code, but I don’t know how to use it, unless it’s to put it into a javascript header or footer.

    I noticed two things: when I published a new post to Mediaum that had the MC4WP form in it, the text of the form came through with the words (paraphrase) “humans should not fill this form and expect good things,” which means that even though I haven’t seen any documentation or someone else saying so, the MC4WP form does contain the honeypot that MC puts in its forms.

    The second is I checked my signup logs and there was a spammer that has been signing a lot of forms and MC was preventing them from signing up. Eventually, though, it made it through.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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