Email Comments Subscriptions Enabled
February 24th, 2007 by Michael Gray in BloggingIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
I enabled the comment subscrption plugin against my better judgement. Y’all complained and I gave in but I ain’t happy about it. But if it gives me one bit of trouble, I’m turning this car around right now and we’re going straight home …
Sphere It
February 25th, 2007 at 3:56 am
I’ve been using it for over a year without a hiccup, in an a previous enterprise with over 3m uniques a month across 150+ sites serving 20million pages a month. In a 12 month period, I received one complaint, from some stupid woman who wasn’t reading the bottom of the notice which said “click here to unsubscribe”. 1 complaint, 12 months, 100 million+ page views. You’re as safe as houses with this
February 25th, 2007 at 8:29 am
It depends on the servers you are on.
I have hacked a CAN-SPAM compliant version of the subscribe-to-comments plugin, and am not setting up so it links through an SMTP rather than using Formmail. Lots of hosts have specific limits for emails which are easily exceeded.
As an example (though I am sure you are using better) a WHM account with Hostgator is limited to 200 per hour, and as standard there are no throttle controls with Wordpress email at all.
If you have 50 emails being sent out for each additional comment, it could hit the limits fast.
I am not sure what RegisterFly is like with spam complaints, I have heard GoDaddy can be horrible
What rules have your hosting company set? I am sure it is different for large blog networks with racks of dedicated servers.
February 25th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
I’ve set it up on hundreds of blogs for myself and clients. Some of which became very popular and never had a single problem.
If you do have a problem it will be because some asshat saw you post about a being worried about such a problem and will purposely do some things to piss you off Michael.
You should have just added it below the radar and there would be no fuss
February 25th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
I have had people spam me and it get through the filter with affiliate links.
There is actually a current case (well at least I haven’t heard the outcome) where a hosting service, Clickbank, and a Clickbank Front End Mall were taken to court by an ISP providing email services because an affiliate sent email that didn’t comply with CAN-SPAM to his mailing list.
Bloggers tend to overlook things because they are not from a marketing background. If you are advising your clients to run non-compliant email systems, it is irresponsible and potentially harmful to your own business.
February 25th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Andy I have watched you over and over advise against such a blogging subscription plugin with zero evidence to backup a negative effect.
There is NO problem. You are paranoid and inventing a problem from what I can see.
Please show me where a popular blog has removed the plugin because of spam complaints.
February 25th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Why do cars have airbags, seat belts and anti-lock breaks… because shit happens
Just read the rules on whatever host you are on as to how many emails you are allowed to send out per day and per hour.
I will have a much more detailed post coming soon with a step by step process to implement things safely.
I am running subscribe-to-comments, but at the same time I don’t expect a massive Digg anytime soon which might result in 100+ comments - not from sensible bloggers but joe public
How many blogs have a privacy statement, terms of service or even a comments policy? (I am lacking in this currently, but it is going to be fixed)
Some of the big blogs are actually very bad examples, in much the same way people point fingers at startups for not having every detail crossed. They are too busy trying to generate content, traffic and revenue.
February 25th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
hip hip whoray
February 25th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Andy you have still yet to show one single example of a site getting in trouble from the plugin.
Please stop spreading propaganda.
February 25th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
As long as you’re running Akismet to block 99.99% of spam (it’s not perfect, but close enough) you’re not going to see any problems, only benefits…for example, this is the third time I’ve visited this post, 2 times were off the back of getting emails notifying me of more comments, so you just tripled your value out of me…but it’s not just me, it works well across the board, not only do you end up with more visitors, you end up with a better conversation (like here…sort of) because people will visit again to comment on comments left etc.. which in itself keeps people coming back over a longer period as well. It’s a WIN/WIN on all counts.
February 25th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I am giving advice, but I am not a lawyer - propaganda suggests I have something to gain
I am not looking to sell anything, and I don’t know of a service I could even promote that I could gain any money from in this instance, so I believe that statement is uncalled for.
If someone provided a managed comment system for email subscriptions, similar to what Aweber or Getresponse offer for email mailing lists, I would be queuing at the door to sign up.
Bloggers don’t care about legal paperwork unless they can get a Digg from pointing the finger at someone else.
Duncan - I totally agree it is Win/Win, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set things up carefully.
If you are running a business it doesn’t hurt you to put contact information in the emails being sent out, and a warning that it might contain commercial content and isn’t necessarily approved by the blog owner.
That covers you on CAN SPAM
It also doesn’t hurt to setup your server so that you use a SMTP service rather than sendmail - plugins exist for the last 3 years - that gives you email flow control.
Aaron is pretty smart, he probably had the SMTP thing done and you didn’t even know about it, plus you were on dedicated servers so could monitor the load, and if it became a problem, you could fix it.
February 25th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Not that I’m complaining cause more page views is almost always good, but y’all could make much more efficient use of your time using co.mments and subscribing to it via RSS