The problem: Spam Subscriptions (and poor replacement for a proper mailing list)
My web site here recently had an uptick in spam subscriptions on the simple subscription form I was using. So, I decided to look for a free solution.
During my search, I also came across a solution for keeping better track of the subscriptions to my web site that was also free.
The subscription form I was using for subscriptions was from a well known and widely used wordpress forms plugin, Wpforms. I combined that with another plugin called popup maker. At the time I decided to use it, I knew the limitation I was accepting which was that I could only keep track of my subscriptions through the emails I received when someone subscribed. Extracting email addresses from individual emails was a bit cumbersome for sure.
So my search for a captcha to eliminate spam subscriptions also turned into a search for something that allowed me to keep track of the subscription emails, like Mailchimp.
The search for a free solution
There are plenty of paid solutions but it was challenging finding a free solution that worked well or at all.
The solution I finally found and adapted is working great and is entirely free with a 100 subscription a month limitation (because Zapier only allows 100 automations a month). The (almost) entire solution I found was here. The only think I added to that solution was the addition of a simple required question to simulate a captcha (and making use of the popup maker wordpress plugin). I won’t go over the entire process as it’s described really well on that web site but it involved using the following:
- Google forms
- Google sheets
- Zapier to tie it all together
- Popup maker (not mentioned on that web site but is how I used this solution to create a popup with the google form in it.)
That last part with popup maker just required the popup maker plugin with a popup that has the code generated from the “send” part of the solution to create the google code. After you’ve created Your google form, and you select send, you then select the “Send via <>” which is the send via html option. Then just paste that code into your popup maker popup in wordpress.
One note on the Zapier instructions on that web site: It was fairly tricky to follow but that was due to Zapiers way of doing things and not to the web site instructions itself.
And voila!
So that’s it. I wasn’t really even using the emails I was getting to make a list of users and that was in large part because it was too cumbersome to extract email addresses from all the emails I would get, one for each subscription. Now I can use Mailchimp to organize subscriptions and can finally use a proper email list for sending out emails. And I solved the spam subscriptions also with this solution which was the original goal.
I hope it helps someone looking for something similar. If you have a question, feel free to email me at support@makethistechwork.com