Bots are signing up to my newsletter? WTF
As some of you know, I have a monthly newsletter (separate from my blog), and I’ve been sending it regularly for about 3 years now. I don’t have a huge number of subscribers, but I’m happy enough with the 3-digit number I currently have.
I don’t advertise my newsletter that often (although I probably should do that more.) So when I started to get 5-7 new signups a day back in May, I thought it was weird. I also noticed the email addresses didn’t look right for most of them. There were a lot of jumbled letters, long strings of numbers—all things that a normal, human probably wouldn’t use. These signups looked suspicious.
There are only to ways 2 sign up to my newsletter right now: a form on my website, and a form attached to my author page on Facebook that I no longer have access to (I deleted my primary Facebook account in January, but I learned when you do that, they don’t delete any pages you may have created or managed. So that page is sitting there in limbo, with this newsletter signup form still attached to it.) When I share a link to my newsletters on socials, there’s a signup option if people view it too (but I don’t share it that way very often. Maybe only once a year.)
Due to the infrequency of my sharing on socials, I really don’t think the weird signups came from there. I also check my website stats daily, so I know when people are looking at my newsletter signup page. The number of suspicious new subscribers didn’t match the hits on my website, which made me think they’re coming from Facebook.
Side note: In case you were wondering, I was deleting the weird email address as they came in, because they did not at all look legit. If you’re reading this and happen to be the owner of a legitimate, yet odd-looking email, and you have signed up to my newsletter but seen nothing in your inbox, I’m sorry for profiling you as a bot. You can try signing up again using the link at the end of this email.
Fast-forward to last week. I ported all of my newsletter stuff over to a new service provider (the provider I was using previously made some changes to their free accounts back in June, and I lost access to some critical elements, so I needed to make this change.) I left the old provider account active only to monitor the weird signups, since I couldn’t change the form on Facebook. My website form has been updated to use the new service.
Guess what? I haven’t had any suspicious signups on the new service, but the old one is still getting multiple each day. This confirmed my theory that these were coming from Facebook, and I’m pretty sure they’re bots.
I did a bit of research on the topic, and I learned that bots signing up to newsletter forms isn’t a new phenomenon. It has been a problem for years.
But what do these bots gain from signing up to my newsletter? That’s a question I still don’t have an answer for.
In the meantime, I will be deactivating the old newsletter service, and that Facebook form will become obsolete. The new service allows me to send a confirmation email when someone signs up (the old one didn’t), so if a bot now tries, they won’t get anywhere unless they go through the confirmation step.
For as small as my subscriber base currently is, I never once thought I’d have to deal with bots signing up to it. It’s weird, and all I can say about it is, WTF?
If you’re a real human and would like to sign up to my monthly newsletter, you can do so using the signup form here. This month’s will feature a recap from my WorldCon experience, some upcoming events I’m looking forward to, and all the books I’ve read this month.