We are getting sign ups from fake accounts.
First, we installed Clarity to see if we can capture such recordings. These sign ups don’t show up in recordings.
Next, we even unpublished the sign up page.
The sign ups from fake accounts still keep happening.
Is there anything we can I do?
These always happen directly and from the sign up page (even when it is unpublished).
I wonder if they’re really coming from your sign-up page, or if the spammers are hitting your magic-link endpoint directly, and just spoofing the referrer. If the sign up page is unpublished, then you should not be getting traffic from it… in fact, it seems like you might be able to safely discard traffic with a referrer that doesn’t exist…
I’ve noticed this trend as well. I’ve had my blog on line for almost 2 years without any signups at all, and then I’ve had 7 in the last 3 weeks. All of the e-mail domains are from companies with seemingly legitimate companies and websites, but they have nothing to do with what i blog about. They seem highly suspect, plus they’ve all signed up in the last three weeks.
Not sure what the incentive would be for a bad actor to sign up for my blog. Perhaps they are compromised e-mails from a data breach. But even then, what would be the incentive to sign them up for my blog?
I’m wondering whether to delete them or not.
I am hoping for some form of official response from Ghost team. It’s an unrealistic to either unpublish sign up page or delete all members that sign up directly.
Wondering if there is a way to confirm sign ups via email click or captcha?
So now I’m really confused. Because the ONLY way to sign up to Ghost natively is to receive a magic link in email and click it. Literally. Users don’t show up in Ghost (unless you created them via API or ran an import or something) without clicking a link.
So… what version of Ghost are you running? Do you have any integrations active? Using Zapier to sync members from somewhere else?
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If you look at the members one at a time, is there any pattern in where they’re coming from? Seven sign-ups doesn’t sound like all that many - it could be someone shared a link on social media or a forum or sent it to a few friends. This doesn’t sound all that nefarious… I think in your shoes, I’d send them each an email welcoming them to the site and asking how they found you, what their interests are, etc. Maybe you’ll learn something!
I check my members page daily. I delete about 5 to 10 new members per week, and yes, there has been an uptick lately. They’re spammers looking to post SEO links in comments. I check my comments daily as well for comments from new members in case I missed one.
For me, it’s easy to find them because the accounts are usually from Pakistan, India or Vietnam and I know they aren’t looking for my content.
There are pages on the internet – a lot on Medium – of hundreds and hundreds of links to blog signup forms for SEO spammers. That’s where they come from. If you see a signup directly to your signup page, it’s almost certainly safe to delete the account. Real people signup from actual pages on your site.
Thanks for sharing your experience with the fake acounts. Are you determining that they are from India, Vietnam, or Pakistan because of the domain name or is there some other way? I haven’t had any signups post comments so I wonder if there is another motivation for them to signup?
What is the best way you’ve found to moderate comments. There doesn’t seem to be a way in the ghost backend to review comments in a convenient view. Thanks for the help.
We’re having the same problem at our site, and it is baffling. Members are showing up in Ghost so clearly they’ve clicked a link somewhere but they’re certainly spam and I get dozens of spam email responses a week. About 1800 spam Members in the last month.
Using Ghost Pro, not self hosted with no integrations or Zapier sync. Does anyone have advice or do we need to figure out adding in a captcha?
Came here to search the same thing.
Fairly stagnant site with no traffic, a sign-up every 1-3 days over the last month or so. All legit domains, all signed in after sign-up. Time on site basically 0 seconds, acquisition always direct.
Email addresses tend to be all USA-based legit businesses, and locations assigned to members always in Europe.
I have comments off so can’t tell if that is the end game or not but it’s becoming a minor frustration.
The location on the Members page shows the country of origin for the IP.
I’m on Ghost Pro, btw.
They usually have a gravatar, which is also a clue because in my experience, most real people don’t. If you click on the member, you get the signup page and source, so you can see if they came from a page of just the form.
The names and icons often are pharma related - pharma spam seems to be in this year.
You genuinely can’t stop them, you just have to keep deleting them, but if you have comments be very vigilant. If you are slow to delete comments, you’ll become a juicier target.
I have just under 1,000 real members, and if I didn’t delete the spam accounts, I’d probably have 3,000.
This thread has been around a while and I haven’t seen anyone from staff weigh in, so at the risk of being impetuous, I’m tagging @John and @prschulz to raise awareness.
Is there anything we can do to prevent these spam accounts? I have added the “agree to receive emails” text to my portal form and marked it required, so I’m hoping that will help, but I have other signup forms on my Ghost(Pro) site outside the portal scattered across the site, so I’m not even sure which form they’re coming from (or if they’re even hitting a form in the first place…)
Any advice would be appreciated.
Anyone else effected still seeing these stream in?
Recieveing about 1 per day, all legit emails, location attributed to Europe usually Germany or Austria.
Just shut off sign-ups until I can come up with a solution.
Thank you for tagging us in.
We’ve looked at this issue several times, and (as of yet) have been unable to identify a specific pattern that would stop these upfront that wouldn’t also block real sign ups. From the examples flagged to date, these signups have been real inboxes (mostly gmail), that open emails, click links, and log in.
@coffeemonk - Would you mind sending a note to support@ghost.org with a few recent examples from the past week (if you haven’t deleted them) and the total number you’ve gotten over the past week as well? That would be really helpful as we look into this further.
I have sent an email with some examples since Jan 13 or so…
volume is not super high, maybe 8–10 per week…
Never had any fake signup on my self hosted Ghost instance. And I get a lot of bots traffic, but they are all blocked by the Cloudflare proxy. It works wonders (for now).
To follow up, I have not seen any new fake signups since Jan 30th. Not sure if you all did something on your end, or if they just lost interest…
I am experiencing the exact same issue as those above. All accounts that look/sound legit. I run a personal blog that gets little to no traffic (at the moment, fingers crossed!) so there is no way I should be getting 52 members in the space of a couple months.
The solution would be to disable email signup completely. But I spent ages getting my email/subscription system set up, it feels a bit lame to have to take it down.