Over on the root of my main website I’ve been trying to set up a newsletter and stone me it’s been more difficult than you would have thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are a number of newsletter\/mailing list plugins and I think I’ve tried five of them. For the most part they were simple to install, medium to hard complexity to configure, and all but one of them allowed some super-weird user behaviour which I won’t permit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After running various tests, I’ve binned them all off except for The Newsletter Plugin<\/a>, and even this one doesn’t come without its issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, the big story is that (with the exception of The Newsletter Plugin) when a user signs up to a newsletter, they all create that signer-up as a user on the website. This may be a good thing but read on. Spammers\/hoaxers and other con artists have bots flying around the Internet looking for these newsletter plugins and – when they find these plugins – they create fake users on your website. The ‘top’ two plugins (in terms of popularity) created approximately 1,000 fake website users per hour. And I’m not happy with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, there are mitigating actions you can take. The obvious one is to install a Captcha of some kind, but that should be your fallback – it shouldn’t be the first thing you do after you’ve installed one of these plugins. Having to get yourself a Google Captcha is a symptom of something that’s very wrong. You are, effectively, putting a third-party patch over someone else’s sloppy coding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unacceptable? Well, I think so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, The Newsletter Plugin seems to be doing what I need it to be doing, but I’m still in Beta test, so I’ll keep my full-throated support muted for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over on the root of my main website I’ve been trying to set up a newsletter and stone me it’s been more difficult than you would have thought. There are a number of newsletter\/mailing list plugins and I think I’ve tried five of them. For the most part they were \u2026 Continue reading