Q&A highlight
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
Ask HN: Do you get bots signing up random email addresses to your newsletter?
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Ask HN: Do you get bots signing up random email addresses to your newsletter?
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
Discussion (3 comments)
Showing 4 comments
Might be a bot looking for a submit form to abuse that will post content to a forum. The HTML or CSS ID on an email field may look the same to a bot no matter the form. So it will submit what matches its goals even though the text body content field does not match.
about 2 months ago
Ah interesting theory, yep could be. A broken bot. Interestingly there is only an email address field and nothing else, so maybe it's failing to recognise that it's not a comment section/forum.
Interestingly it always visit the homepage, and within 1 second sign up to the newsletter, and then it does a random walk through about 5-10 pages (always different links) before stopping. So maybe it is looking for a forum or something.
Do you use a newsletter signup plugin or is it hand-written?
about 2 months ago
It’s all my own code, interestingly. So the bot must be just searching for any email field and submitting to it, for some reason.
My latest update is I managed to block the bot by hiding the email sign up until the user scrolls the page. Turns out the bot doesn’t scroll. So no more random email signups anymore!