Looked through the topics and didn’t see this addressed:

I have two Nourish projects. One is a list associated with my blog/website. The only two places that I’ve placed the signup form/widget is on my blog (on every page) and on the contact page of my website. In both cases, I have Statcounter code – even on the ‘thank you’ page that thanks people for signing up.

My last couple of signups though do not appear in my Statcounter. I don’t see any other way they could have signed up – unless the folks at II are using ‘seeds’ again.

Am I getting potential spammers? Is there some rational explanation that I don’t know of (yet)?

Thanks.

Jason Pedley
mail@jasonpedley.com

Jason,

I’m looking into it for you right now, I’ll try to have an answer for you inquiry ASAP.

Thanks!

I think I may have a theory:

Some spammer with a Nourish account can go in and see the subscribe link like this:

http://app.nouri.sh/campaigns/84/subscribers/new (which is mine)

and start changing the ‘84’ in the URL every number under the sun including:

http://app.nouri.sh/campaigns/7/subscribers/new (and many others)

The ‘thank you’ screen when you sign up this way is a Nourish page – so none of the project owners would have any way to track this.

Again, just a theory.

Let us know what you find. Thanks!

Another thought (I’m full of them) – Google can crawl the pages that I linked to above…and a few others. Might be worth it to stop that in your robots.txt file if possible. You can search for these pages in a Google advanced search.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=app.nouri.sh%2Fcampaigns%2F&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images

Jason,

Interesting theories, I’ll have to investigate them if the info I have doesn’t work for you, thanks for keeping me posted on them. Here’s something I found for your problem, I hope this helps!

Nourish makes default forms available. Signups could come from there, and those would not show up on the statcounter. The URL to the default form can be found by clicking on the campaign, then selecting the “subscribers” tab.

So please try checking that and if it doesn’t work, I’ll look into your ideas and other possibilities as well.

Thanks!

That makes sense. I think I sort of addressed that above since the link you refer to is at:

http://app.nouri.sh/campaigns/84/subscribers/new Correct?

Nothing on my site links directly that default form page, and I’ve never published that page (that I know if) for it to be accessible via my website or a search engine even by searching for the exact URL. I’ve always done the HTML for an inserted it into my website/WordPress blog. To me, anyway, that says that someone (spammer, or merely someone just fooling around) has registered with Nourish, noticed that their default form URL has a number in it and started changing that number to see what other projects/campaigns are out there. Or they’ve done a Google search to see what’s in this folder:

site:app.nouri.sh/campaigns/

When I do that site search in Google, I get 44 public results. I’m not sure if that’s intended or not by Nourish, but to me it seems like the project numbers need to be made less easy to alter via URL manipulation and less easy to find via Google. Instead of my project being “84’, make it “o84” or something and change the robots.txt file to turn away the bots from indexing those pages.

A similar thing happened to me with my former service – Zookoda. Spammers did a Google search for “enter your email address” and I got spam subscribers by the dozens who were (assumingly) trying to exploit the system. I just don’t want to see that happen here…even the attempt.

Thanks for your help with this.

Jason

Jason,

I hope everything works out from here on. I’ll be send your suggestions on to our developer to see what can be done and to hopefully circumvent any future user problems with spammers.

Thanks!

Anthony