Currently, when a new user subscribes, they’ll have to go to their email for confirmation, and then to back on the website to activate the newsletter subscription. Right now, I tell the user that if they want to receive the newsletter, they will have to go to their account and opt-in.
It makes sense within GDPR, but another mechanism could work - in theory.
On the sign-up popup, users could be directly prompted to opt-in to the newsletter.
Has this behavior not been implemented by purpose? If so I’d like to know what’s wrong with it. Otherwise, I’d be happy to contribute and add it to the sign-in mechanism.
+1 this. The perfect GDPR compliance would be being able to just add a checkmark and a link to privacy policy on from as a first opt-in. The double opt-----in is not enoughht.
(I don’t work for Ghost. I’m a community member and volunteer moderator. I also work as a freelancer for clients using Ghost full-time, so I see a LOT of Ghost sites.)
I’m not sure which issue you mean. Email confirmation is the correct way to take sign-ups.
True story:
I had a client last summer coming from Mailchimp, where he was not requiring email confirmation. He was super excited to have doubled his subscribers in the previous year while on Mailchimp. Then we looked at the data. He was in USA, doing local/regional, but most of his new subscribers were in Asia and Africa. And although the emails looked legit, the user names were all things like oTnz73nB ChnYTw13. So… yeah. Not real sign ups.
When you let people subscribe without somehow validating that they own the email address they just entered, you invite a variety of abusive behaviors, and you seriously risk sending email to people who didn’t sign up, who will be annoyed and report your messages as spam (because they are, if the recipient didn’t sign up), and this is terrible for deliverability.
Having a user click the ‘magic link’ to validate their email isn’t the only option – for example, you could have them link a 3rd party account (Google, Github, LinkedIn, etc). I have a 3rd party integration for Ghost that does this. Basically, we’re trusting that the other platform has validated the email already, instead of requiring the user to do so with us.
If you meant is there a way to have someone agree to your terms when signing up, yes! That’s implemented in portal now - you can add your custom text and a required checkbox.
But they absolutely still need to click the emailed link.