is it getting a little Spammy in here?
Posted on: May 11, 2012
UPDATED:
thanks to some helpful blog buddes, here is how to get rid the checkboxes that have been causing me to swear uncontrollably and turn to drink:
Dashboard – Settings – Discussion. Scroll all the way to the bottom to the section called “Follow Comments”. Uncheck “show follow comments option in Comment Form”, and then uncheck “Follow blog in Comment form”. Save changes.
Dashboard – Settings – Reading. Under Follower Settings, uncheck “show follow button to logged out users”.
my e-mail inbox already feels much better. and lighter.
I don’t know about you, but my e-mail inbox has been making me feel really, really popular. A little too popular in fact.
WordPress blogs love me so much that I get an e-mail every time I post on a comment, and every time someone else posts on a blog post that I commented on Perhaps you saw my rant on Twitter the other night.
how many wordpress blogs are in your reader? it adds up to a metric ton of e-mail notification, doesn’t it? I never even noticed it before, but there are two checkboxes under the the comment box. One check box asks if you want to be notified of posts via e-mail, the other asks if you want to be notified of comments via e-mail. They both used to always default to unchecked, so you had to opt-in to an e-mail subscription. Guess what: now they intermittently default to checked. Yup, now you have to opt-out.
I’m going to give WordPress the benefit of the doubt, and hope this isn’t a permanent change, the type of which I like to call “pulling a facebook”.
In the meantime, whenever you comment on my blog, or on anyone else’s WordPress, make sure you are looking at those check boxes (they don’t appear until you click your cursor in the comment field) and un-check them.
your e-mail inbox and your sanity will thank you.
Attention WordPress friends: In your dashboard, go under Settings and then Discussion. All the way at the bottom is a “reply” field. This is where you can invite people to leave responses, and remind them to uncheck those little boxes of evil.
29 Responses to "is it getting a little Spammy in here?"
May 11, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Oooohhhh! I never even noticed. Thanks for the info!!!
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 12:51 pm
I hadn’t noticed the new default until my inbox exploded as well.
At least it’s SPAM that’s easier to take than an offer to refinance my house while losing weight and enhancing my performance…LOL
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 1:27 pm
It annoys me too. I don’t know why they feel the need to add this ridiculous tweeks. It’s difficult to remember to uncheck every time until you are in the habit of doing it.
You can remove them all in one swoop though I’ve noticed, go to your subscription page and there is an option for subscribed comments. You can just delete them
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 2:10 pm
That explains the excessive emails lately. I didn’t click ‘Yes’ to email notifications on every comment. So the default thing makes sense. I unchecked your box.
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 3:27 pm
Thanks for the heads up!
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 3:34 pm
I deleted the option to show the checkbox for readers of my own blog under my blog’s settings (I think it was under “Discussion” because apparently if the checkbox isn’t shown then the spammage doesn’t occur. But then no one can opt in either – but thats better then spam I think!
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 4:03 pm
WOOHOO!! FIXED IT!
thank you to Richard and Wazeau for saving my sanity!
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 6:30 pm
“Pulling a facebook”–that’s beautiful. Thanks for the heads-up!
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 7:44 pm
YES! Okay good, I’m not crazy. I thought all of a sudden all those little check boxes were coming up checked and I had never noticed that before… How incredibly annoying.
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 11:22 pm
Yes, I noticed it after I started getting quite a lot of spam as well.
That part wasn’t too bad, I then became almost furious with it though when I kept commenting and accidentally resubscribing, especially when I remembered to check it riiiiiight as I clicked the ‘Post Comment’ button.
😛
LikeLike
May 12, 2012 at 10:16 am
“I kept commenting and accidentally resubscribing”
that happened to me like 10 times last night. I’d hit “submit”, and then shout “damnit!!!”
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 11:44 pm
I am happy to hear that you fixed your WordPress issue. Now that is crazy…I can just imagine the amount of notifications that you received. WOAAAAH!!
LikeLike
May 12, 2012 at 10:18 am
like 40 a day. i ended up deleting pages at a time, and now I”m worried i accidentally deleted some important e-mails. i probably shouldn’t be bitching, i’m not paying to use wordpress.
LikeLike
May 12, 2012 at 6:05 am
I was wondering about that.
I’m on blogger and I follow some wordpress blogs through it but now I keep getting emails on subscriptions to comments which I wasn’t planning on following. I noticed the checkbox but I keep forgetting to un-check it.
LikeLike
May 12, 2012 at 10:19 am
i’m still getting used to remembering to check. if wordpress had made a useful announcement or osmehting, or told everyone that their defaults had changed, that would have been OK.
i think if you tag all those e-mails as junk, they will automatically go in your junk folder and you won’t even see them.
LikeLike
May 12, 2012 at 6:09 am
Not only that, but as I wanted to check the possibility of transfering to wordpress from blogger now I cannot comment on wordpress blogs with my usual details, wordpress keeps changing my details to the wrong ones and it requires some serious manoeuvring to get them right.
(and many lost comments)
LikeLike
May 12, 2012 at 10:20 am
ah yes, i sympathize. i switched from blogger to wordpress a few years ago, and on most blogspots it will only accept my old, out of date blogger log in to comment. it’s the blogger/wordpress war, and it’s a pain in the ass for us bloggers!!
LikeLike
Yes it is, as you can see there is a comment up there made under my wordpress account (theines) which I thought didn’t get logged. :S
LikeLike
May 12, 2012 at 4:12 pm
In case you haven’t seen my email yet, yes go ahead and post the instructions if you like! Glad it wiped out the bloody boxes!
LikeLike
May 12, 2012 at 6:37 pm
just a few minutes ago saw your e-mail, and updated the post above w/ instructions. hopefully they will be helpful to others as well.
bloody boxes indeed!
LikeLike
May 17, 2012 at 2:23 am
I’m glad I’m not the only one ranting about this. Apparently wordpress considers it a new feature.
There is now a way to opt-out of receiving the spam, I mean email, if you have a wordpress account. They parked the option box over on the global settings page under the reader tab where no one would think to look. http://wordpress.com/#!/read/subsettings/
I was getting really tired of seeing email notifications from my own comments on my own blog! How stupid! I’ll stop ranting now.
LikeLike
May 17, 2012 at 9:32 am
thanks for the additional tip! i just updated my settings to “no e-mail delivery” and unchecked the Notify me Of Follow Up Comments box.
maybe this is WordPress’s not so subtle way of telling me I should start paying for a domain name.
LikeLike
May 17, 2012 at 1:11 pm
I think they want to be facebook. They’re also rolling out infinite scroll to their free themes, where the page just keeps loading posts. Setting a fixed number of posts per page is disabled.
Yeah, if we don’t like it we have to move to wordpress.org and pay for hosting.
LikeLike
May 17, 2012 at 9:47 pm
hmmm, infinite scroll might not be a terrible thing, although if there is a lot of images, like on a photography blog, the load time would be a bitch. wordpress hosting isn’t expensive (less than the cost of a new hardback book!), but the e-mail spamminess was pretty uncool.
LikeLike
the Little Red Reviewer 
May 11, 2012 at 12:11 pm
This move by WP seems to be irritating a lot of people…a lot! I hope they fix it soon. Try to keep your sanity. Happy Friday!
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 12:18 pm
I just wish they had told people ahead of time of the change, instead of just surprising users with pages upon pages of e-mails. WordPress already lets me see all that in the “New Posts” area and in dashboard, why do I need it in my e-mail too?
LikeLike
May 11, 2012 at 2:13 pm
Agreed. I’m frustrated by the flood of e-mails, especially since I keep forgetting to click the damn box.
LikeLike