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How to Protect Yourself From Bot Signups to Your List?

by trentonlaura
14 replies
I've been getting a ton of subscriptions on a list of mine from spambots. I have no clue why spambots sign up for email lists to begin with, but does anyone have any tips on how to cut down or eradicate them completely?

I've added double opt-in which involves a captcha and I've also added additional fields hoping that might stymie their efforts and yet they still get through.

Fortunately they're easy enough to spot because the lion's share come from the same dozen or so extensions/domains or similar domains.

More obvious is that one of my required fields essentially asks subscribers what they want to learn by signing up for my list, and the bots always paste in the standard biography BS (my name is ... and I like ...)

Nevertheless, it's annoying and requires constant upkeep on my end. Anyone have any solutions beyond what I've tried?
#bot #list #protect #signups
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  • Profile picture of the author Wingsofsuccess1
    Ive never had that problem...

    The question is where are you getting traffic? Because it seems like its extremely low quality
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    • Profile picture of the author trentonlaura
      Consider yourself lucky. It's a marketing website which receives mostly organic traffic. Might have something to do with my email marketing service as I just switched and never had this problem in the past.
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      • Profile picture of the author gianbizz
        How did you know that the subscriptions are from spambot?

        In my case, I was got some fake subscriptions, I know it by check domain emails they used. There are a lot of subscriptions using disposable/temporary emails, then I block all emails with such domains.
        You can find list of disposable email provider domains here: https://gist.github.com/adamloving/4401361

        Hope it useful
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        • Profile picture of the author trentonlaura
          I know they're spam bots for the two reasons I mentioned in the initial post.

          Additionally, I put my autoresponder campaigns on hold while I was testing to further confirm that they were spam bots, meaning no one was receiving follow up emails.

          Then, on the confirmation URL on my site (which they have to visit after confirming their subscription to/joining my list) I explicitly wrote that if they aren't receiving the autoresponder series then email me, and not a single one of them have. Fortunately this level of bot behavior is easy enough to spot but still frustrating.

          Thanks for the tip, though.
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  • Profile picture of the author bizlinkx
    If you have access to cpanel, or wordress you can either login to cpanel and block the IP's from there or you can find a plugin inside the wordpress directory that will allow you to block IP's. If you cannot find it in Cpanel either contact your web host and they do it for you or walk you through it, or go to Fiverr and hire someone to do it for you.
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    • Profile picture of the author trentonlaura
      That's a good tip. I'd think spammers would be using lots of proxies but still something to keep in mind, thank you.
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Brindamour
    trentonlaura,

    Where are you getting your traffic from? You must have a bad traffic source. Make sure you have tracking links so you know where your traffic is coming from. Also, you may get an address once in a while that someone is not using or is fake, if they haven't opened one of your messages in 6 months, delete them from you list.

    Chris
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  • Profile picture of the author DIABL0
    Check out http://clickmagick.com

    They have a feature for detecting bots and other possible fake traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author copywriterpros
    I guess that around the internet you can for sure find some good and cheap plug-in that can help you in blocking or protecting you from a different kind of bots and machine automatic systems.
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  • Profile picture of the author searchnology
    Install CAPTCHA (or something similar)on your optin web form. Most bots can't read captcha.
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  • Profile picture of the author SeventhSense
    Diligent list maintenance are going to be key. The bad thing about bots is in the long term they really hurt your sender reputation and lower your deliverability. Track your open rates and if subscribers aren't engaging after your welcome series, statistically chances are either bots or disinterested humans who you don't want on your list.

    There's also software that will slowly lower the frequency of your emails to non-responsive address which basically automates the list maintenance for you. https://www.theseventhsense.com/blog...y-optimization
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  • Profile picture of the author zeus136
    Why is your captcha system not working?
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  • Profile picture of the author JohnVianny
    Use software like this:
    https://www.briteverify.com/

    you can easily google similar by typing "real time opt in checker email"
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  • Profile picture of the author Jay Brazen
    I have had this problem and for me it seems that certain autoresponder services do a better job at keeping spam bots out than others.

    When I used GetResponse and SendLane I would get constant spam leads into my accounts to optin pages I had not even started promoting yet.

    When I had used AWeber and MailChimp I did not have any spam leads come into my account at all. So maybe they have some sort of spam detection that protects accounts from getting spam leads.

    By the way, this is from setting these accounts at single optin.

    What autoresponder service do you use?
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