• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Foliovision

Main navigation

  • Weblog
    • FV Player
    • WordPress
    • Video of the Week
    • Case Studies
    • Business
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Meet the Team
    • We Support
    • Careers
    • Contact
    • Pricing
  • Products
  • Support
    • FV Player Docs
    • Pro Support
  • Login
  • Basket is empty
Affordable VAST/VPAID for Wordpress has arrived. Serve ads with your videos starting today!

Trouble with WordPress Subscribe to Comment Plugin in WP 2.9: Gurken’s the solution

23 April 2010 / Alec Kinnear / 8 Comments

One of our client recently had an annoying comment posted on his site. Even more annoyingly, the commenter had posted a fake email and clicked Subscribe to Comments. Now this client runs a pretty busy client section: 200 comments per post is not uncommon.

Result of the fake address passing: over 200 bounced emails in his inbox. Richard tried to remove the commenter’s subscription in the admin section of Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe to Comments (WP Plugins). It didn’t work.

We tried to block the user from receiving any comments. Didn’t work.

Clearly there is an issue between WordPress Subscribe to Comments and WordPress 2.9. Easy enough to fix. But we have about five popular plugins right now in active development and adopting another step-child would take us away from our existing work.

What did work for stopping the bounced emails, we simply removing the commenter’s address from the email.

wordpress subscribe to comments options
WordPress Subscribe to Comments Admin options:
These are the ones which don’t work in WordPress 2.9
unsubscribe and block – they are still working in Gurken

After that we did a bit of looking around and a fellow by the name of Martin Spuetz has written a fork called Gurken Subscribe to Comments (WP Plugins). What’s important is that Gurken Subcribe to Comments is fully compatible with Mark’s version which means that installation is just a question of disabling one and enabling the other and at some future date it would be possible to switch back again.

Gurken Subscribe to Comments admin section does work, allowing commenters to be unsubscribed or blocked. It has another big advantage: which is double opt-in. A user has to accept being subscribed to comments.

How can double opt-in help?

  • A fake email will only bounce once, not 200 times.
  • A real email which is being routed into someone’s spam bin will only go once.
  • If someone subscribe’s with someone else’s email, s/he will only be disturbed once.

I don’t know when Mark is planning to update Subscribe to Comments, but a big thank you to Martin Spuetz. As usual with German plugin authors, the code is excellent but the documentation is all in German. Fortunately Martin and I both speak German, so there is a whole new world of plugins out there waiting for us.

We’re also trying Sergey Müller’s Antispam Bee (WP Plugins) in place of WP Spam Free, as even with our custom modifications on a busy site WP Spam Free puts a heavy load on servers.  Here’s the excellent German documentation. Here’s the English documentation. Wait, there isn’t any.

Alec Kinnear

Alec Kinnear

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.

Categories: WordPress

Related Posts

  1. Simpler Unsubscribe to WordPress Comments for Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

  2. How to solve the comment notifications spam issues

  3. Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Better Unsubscribe – Installation

    Subscribe to Comments Reloaded Better Unsubscribe – Installation

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Mark 10 May 2010 at 10:52 pm

    I too use the Subscribe to Comments and am frustrated with the bug (and the develper not interested in fixing it). I saw the other plugin you mention but didn’t see any English so I left it.

    But, I’m willing to try it given your post (thanks!). But I just wanted to make sure that when you say I can deactivate the old one and then activate the new one, that this means that all current subscriptions will still be active, without having to double opt in on them.

    Just replace and go, right?

    Reply
  2. Martin 14 May 2010 at 6:02 am

    Hello Mark,

    you are right, all the subscription from original Subscribe to Comments plugin are already considered as confirmed, no double opt for them.

    Thanks, Martin

    Reply
  3. Mark 6 September 2010 at 1:39 pm

    Thank you so much for writing this up. I’d been frustrated as well with the Admin section that did not work. But I was afraid to install a German language plugin I did not understand..

    By the way, for anyone doing this, you have to deactivate the original plugin first, before installing the new one; if you try it the other way around, you will get an error.

    Now, I just have to see to add a Subscribe without commenting box. I think there is a way to do that.

    Reply
  4. Vladimir 13 September 2010 at 11:32 pm

    Hi there!

    I love this plugin, it´s really great! It´s working just fine, BUT only with NEW posts… I did many tests and when I subscribe an OLD post, no email has been sending when someone write a comment on it. Again, If I publish a new post, the plugin works fantastically!

    Any suggestion?

    I really appreciate!

    Reply
  5. zdenka 14 September 2010 at 8:01 am

    Hi Vladimir,

    we are using this plugin on many sites for a long time and we haven’t experienced any issues you’re describing. We just tested the actual version of this plugin on old posts to look specially at this issue, and it worked without any problems. Your problem might be somewhere else, the plugin seems to be working fine.

    Zdenka

    Reply
  6. Saxamo 28 September 2010 at 6:53 am

    Hello there,

    I am currently using your plugin on my site. The site is used for testing and creating pages for other sites.

    I uninstalled subscribe to comments cause the subscribe link was way down on the page

    [link was removed]

    I tried to check off the remove clear:both which is what is causing this but the check mark comes back on its own.

    I installed your subscribe to comments hoping that your updated version of the plugin would take care of this. Unfortunately, after installing your plugin the same thing happens. I check off

    Do a CSS “clear” on the subscription checkbox/message (uncheck this if the checkbox/message appears in a strange location in your theme)

    and when I click on the subscribe to comments under settings the check mark is automatically back again.

    Any and all help is appreciated here. I really mean that.

    Kind regards, Saxamo

    Reply
  7. conualfy 10 October 2010 at 8:57 pm

    Thanks for the solution, before this I’ve been using Subscribe to comments with some modifications to work as I expected it to.

    Reply
  8. Babel 3 January 2011 at 9:42 am

    i have the same problem like Saxama, any solutions?

    Kim

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You can click here to Subscribe without commenting

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Business
  • Camera Reviews
  • Case Studies
  • Design
  • FV Player
  • Internet Marketing
  • IT
  • Life
  • SEO
  • Slovak
  • Video of the Week
  • WordPress

Footer

Our Plugins

  • FV WordPress Flowplayer
  • FV Thoughtful Comments
  • FV Simpler SEO
  • FV Antispam
  • FV Gravatar Cache
  • FV Testimonials

Free Tools

  • Pandoc Online
  • Article spinner
  • WordPress Password Finder
  • Delete LinkedIn Account
  • Responsive Design Calculator
Foliovision logo
All materials © 2025 Foliovision s.r.o. | Panská 12 - 81101 Bratislava - Slovakia | info@foliovision.com
  • This Site Uses Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  • Site Map
  • Contact
  • Tel. ‭+421 2/5292 0086‬

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in .

Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie allow you to log in and download your software or post to forums.

We use the WordPress login cookie and the session cookie.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.

Support Cookies

Foliovision.com uses self-hosted Rocket.chat and self-hosted Freescout support desk to provide support for FV Player users. These cookies allow our visitors to chat with us and/or submit support tickets.

We are delighted to recommend self-hosted Rocket.chat and especially Freescout to other privacy-conscious independent publishers who would prefer to self-host support.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!

3rd Party Cookies

This website uses Google Analytics and Statcounter to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.

Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.

We reluctantly use Google Analytics as it helps us to test FV Player against popular Google Analytics features. Feel free to turn off these cookies if they make you feel uncomfortable.

Statcounter is an independent Irish stats service which we have been using since the beginning of recorded time, sixteen years ago.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!