With the addition of email subscriptions in Jetpack 1.2, one common question is: is it possible to view your list of subscribers? The good news: you can. The bad news: it’s disturbingly hard to find.
Unless you posess psychic powers, or you are one of the programmers who worked on this, you’re unlikely to find it. We’ll work on making this simpler in the future, but for now, here’s what you do:
- Go to your Dashboard
- Click on Site Stats
- Scroll all the way down
- On the left, you’ll see a section labeled Subscriptions
If you click on the link labeled blog followers, you’ll see a list of all of the email address of people who have subscribed to your blog.
Again, we’re sorry this is so hard to find, and we expect to simplify this in the future. I could explain why this happened, but that rarely satisfies anyone, so I won’t.
Ok. If you really want to know, I can share one important fact. At the time we released Jetpack 1.2, WordPress.com was moving away from use of the term subscriber, in favor of the term follower. If we followed along (ha ha), we’d annoy people by using a new term. But if we didn’t, we’d annoy people by using an old term. Either way we’d annoy some percentage of our users. We went with the later approach, We also knew that when 1.2 released, we’d likely get questions about what’s going on, and need to write a post like the one you are reading, explaining why there were some strange design choices in how subscriptions worked in Jetpack.
In the short term, this post should help clarify things. In the long term, we’ll consider paving over this UI pothole with pure Jetpack goodness. Thanks for reading, and jetpacking.
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There’s no option to download the subscriber/follower list of emails? If the admin can’t add, delete, etc., then the list really isn’t his, right?
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Correct. What you see on the follower list is what you get. There is no admin UI nor any ability to import or export this list.
If you could add or remove to this list, what would do what that functionality? Unlike a mailing list, where you might want to exclude certain people from membership, (most) blogs are public, and therefore, consumable by anyone.
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Thanks for the reply, Scott. Main concern is being able to download the list if I were to ever go to another type of notification system. Also, on the add/remove, I just moved my blog to self-hosted and I wanted to import addresses from an old email list server to jetpack. No can do.
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Scott,
Your answer is lame.
I will agree that blogs are public. However, you are missing a very important point: I am the OWNER of the blog. Therefore I should have full rights to decide who is on the mailing list and who is not. For example, I have several subscribers (excuse me, “followers”) that are pure spam. The email address are bogus and clearly spam. I have a REAL problem with not being able to edit the list and remove these spam email address.
What is even more disturbing is that when the email goes out, it contains the email address I have selected from my blog. Once you start sending emails to bogus (spam) email address, you end up getting your email in the cyber cesspool just ripe to receive back even more spam. I cannot for a moment believe you would agree this is such a great idea.
I challenge you Scott, make a disclosure of where the data is stored. What table in the database contains the email addresses? There is obviously something going on here, otherwise you would not have sent a SPECIFIC email with instructions on how to see the “list”.
Tell us – inquiring minds want to know…
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You’re reading too much into my question. I asked the question so we can better understand what needs you folks have. It was a genuine question, without assuming any particular answer was good or bad.
As the current incarnation of the universe works, we have to do work to add features – we don’t get them for free. The main reason anything we might do doesn’t do what you want is we have to choose which things, across all of WordPress.com and Jetpack to invest our limited resources in. Rather than some cunning plan designed to prevent you from doing some particular thing. For most feature decisions in Jetpack, we naturally start with what WordPress.com does.
This means all of the limitations you find, however lame, are limitations that already exist in how email subscriptions work on WordPress.com. Of course we can improve on it, or change it, but before I have my team do work, I need to understand what problems bloggers are trying to solve, so I can prioritize, and aim those resources in the right way. There are 800k blogs using Jetpack, and not all of those bloggers care about the same things.
Spam is an issue we care about, and our Akismet service is what we use in many places to handle it. I can, at minimum, look into how we can use Akismet to automatically handle the situation you describe. And of course, we will consider giving bloggers more control over their email followers in future versions.
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Fair enough – I can understand where you are coming from.
However, my question is still not answered: where are the email addresses stored? What table in the database are they stored? Is this some “secret”?
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@ bowtie6
From what I could understand, the subscribers are not stored anywhere on our WP installation, but rather somewhere outside our servers. Probably on WP.COM’s servers? Some features from Jetpack are linked to the WP.COM account (like stats), so I think something similar happens for the subscribers.
Scott can probably confirm if I’m right or just crazy 😛
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Thanks for the humor and in the info!
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I am eagerly waiting for the feature by which I can import email sunscribers of wordpress.com to self hosted wordpress.org. Please add this feature.
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make that 2 of us.
And btw, there is no way to see the comment subscribers, only the blog ones.
I really wanted to use it, but the lack of control over the subscribers made me choose to continue using the Subscribe2 plugin, which I’d rather drop to use Jetpack’s.
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As my blog is a paid subscription service, I need the ability to unsubscribe someone who decides they do not want to continue their subscription. As far as I know, even though I might have the ability to identify the subscribers I do not have the ability to unsubscribe them (only they can unsubscribe themselves) and therefore cannot use this feature and won’t be installing Jetpack.
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Hi Scott,
Here’s another question…
After you read a post of mine, I have a box at the end that says,
“Like what you’ve read here? Sign up to receive updates from Go Gingham sent directly to your e-mail. Let’s Go Gingham! Subscribe to Go Gingham by e-mail or in your favorite reader here. You can become a fan of Go Gingham on Facebook or follow Go Gingham on Twitter.”
And I have everything linked to my various social media spots. This is in a widget that is titled “After singular.” Currently, my “subscribe to by e-mail” is still connected to my feedburner because I can’t figure out how to add the link for the WordPress sign-up without the box, etc.
Is that possible? To add a text link spot?
Does this make sense??
Thank you!
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Thanks for the update! Would be nice to be able to reply to our subscribers – individually, if we choose.
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Now I know! When I received the first email about this, it made no mention of where I could find subscriber data so I never used it. I assumed it didn’t exist and capturing the data is important for me. I will certainly use it on a few sites and see how it works out. Thanks!
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I love jetpack I just wish we could customize color and customize the email for confirmation and such.
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Hello
To install jetpack, I had to go on a host on which I installed WordPress and BuddyPress. It so happens that those who register on the site do not automatically receive the newsletter but need to register on the new widget to receive newsletters.
I also installed Wangguard and as soon as I get a listing on the platform, I automatically wangguard on whether it is a spammer or sploggueur.
I understand that people do want to receive the newsletter. But would it not make it automatic for people who register on the site?
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Thanks Scott for showing us on how to find our subscribers/followers, it’s a big help. Though the common problems here are… how we’re able to reply our followers individually and how to remove those bogus followers?
Nevertheless, Jetpack is awesome! 🙂
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I want to remove / delete few of my Subscribers. Pls tell me how to do it.
Thank You.
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I’d love to see more info about the new comment function. Will it be available soon? 😦
Every day without it is making my life more miserable, my penis smaller, and my breakfast cereal less tasty. I cry myself to sleep every night, just by the sheer knowledge of the comment function not being there.
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Can you please let us know will this feature be avaliable to self hosted wp sites and if it will be, when ?
Come on guys, look at Daniel.
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Come on Guys I need to delete all followers- can’ t this is be done any way?
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Hi Chris:
As mentioned earlier in the comments here, the behavior we currently provide is exactly the same as what is currently available on WordPress.com. We’re happy to consider adding and changing how it works, but we did not deliberately disable a feature to frustrate you.
Generally email subscriptions can be thought as a cousin to RSS Feeds. You can’t control who reads you RSS feed for your blog, and I’ve yet to hear a complaint from users about that lack of control. Email is just another delivery mechanism visitors can choose to use.
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I would like to “localize”, translate the message that is appearing after someone click on the “subscribe’ button. Actually it says : An email was just sent to confirm your subscription. Please find the email now and click activate to start subscribing.
The confirmation message received was in french though… probably because my account on WordPress.com has this preference. Would it be possible to make this language the default for the followers of a french blog ?
Thanks
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Reblogged this on nilspeters and commented:
Comments…
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Hi Scott
I’ve noticed on a wordpress.com blog that I run that Twitter and Facebook followers as well as email/comment followers are included in the follow information box. I know that JetPack does not currently run the wp.com ‘Publicize’ feature, which is presumably how .com blogs link to Twitter and FB, but is there any possibility that this would be added for self-hosted blogs at some point? It would be brilliant to have a ‘full’ follow list where *all* of these services were together, just like it is at .com.
Anyway, thanks for all your hard work to date 🙂
Best wishes
Pandora
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I have had someone who personally requested to be removed from the list and they are not capable of doing it themselves. Please help us understand how to remove email addresses from the list that we don’t want there, as well as for those who would like to be removed but can’t.
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Hi Troy: Every email sent by wordpress.com includes a link to unsubscribe at the bottom.
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Hi Scott,
The site I have that has Jetpack on it, is a subscription site, and it was actually an ex-member that pointed out to the owner of the site that she is still recieving emails regarding a thread that she subscribed to.
This means tht while the content is proctected on site, so that non-paying members can’t view it, 4 people that subcribed via Jetpack are still recieveing new posts via email regardless of if they are paying members or even members.
I don’t mind removing them at a database level if required.Any idea what table I should be looking at?
Thanks,
Chris.
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Chris,
I read your posts – indeed I just want to have more control over the subscriptions on MY blog.
About your question: “I don’t mind removing them at a database level if required.Any idea what table I should be looking at?”, look above many posts and you will see I basically asked the same question. Yet it went unanswered and pretty much ignored.
If this is something that needs to be done at the database level, then I think we should be able to know what table this information is stored.
Perhaps now that it is TWO of us asking the same basic question someone might be able to answer this.
This is obviously a very hot subject since this thread is not going away – matter of fact, folks are asking for this feature. Actually this should be basic functionality.
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As for no “complaints”, I am not complaining nor were:
J. Randal Matheny – “If the admin can’t add, delete, etc., then the list really isn’t his, right?”
bowtie6 – “I am the OWNER of the blog. Therefore I should have full rights to decide who is on the mailing list and who is not.”
metalpig – “how to remove those bogus followers?”
Nandita B.- “I want to remove / delete few of my Subscribers. Pls tell me how to do it.”
I and I feel most of the above probably feel happy to do this a code level.
Cheers
Chrs Pettiipiere
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I want to remove / delete few of my Subscribers. Pls tell me how to do it. I feel happy to do this a code level. Please tell us where and in what table this information is stored.
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We launched our blog in the first week of January. At that time, the “Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)” widget would send users a confirmation email about their “Subscription.” We noticed last week that users are now being sent an email confirming their interest in “Following” the blog.
1) Did something change behind the scenes that I’m not aware of?
2) Does signing up to Follow vs Subscribe make a difference? (as long as the user gets new post alerts by email we don’t care)
3) Most importantly: the Follow Confirmation email starts out with the salutation “Howdy” whereas the Subscribe Confirmation email didn’t. My client hates the use of “Howdy.” Is there a way to customize the greeting in the Follow email?
Thanks a lot for your help!
Phil
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Yeah, I would like to be able to export the list maybe via CSV. Those subscribers are gold to a blogger, so not being able to export them doesn’t really help.
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I “second” rulloff’s comment, and I’m adding my comment as a petition to add the ability to download our subscriber’s email list. Thanks for listening.
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Completely agree! It’s my blog they subscribed to, not WordPress. They follow my content, they are my viewers and readers. I should have control over the list and be able to export it and edit it. It’s not news to anyone that bloggers need their readers so it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request.
We need help here WP, just let us know where the info is stored and we will figure out what to do with our own subscribers.
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Hi
If you also made any translaten to germany and maybe can you tell me wehere i can find the text files, so that i can translate it manualy: An email was just sent to confirm your subscription. Please find the email now and click activate to start subscribing.
and the text comes with the email.
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For a feature suggestion, how about a way to exclude certain post categories?
I understand the comparison to the RSS feed and how we have no control over who sees it or what they see, but does the average user understand that? When I update certain post categories that are not viewable within the blog, but only within certain features of the site, the emailed content the user receives might not make sense to them, thus encouraging them to remove themselves from the list.
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Hi Micahel: Interesting idea. For now we consider email subscriptions to be analogous to RSS subscriptions, where users get all of your posts. But its an interesting idea.
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Is there any way to configure the content that is emailed through the Subscription feature? I don’t like that my entire post is distributed to my followers. This gives them no incentive to return to my site if I am hand-delivering content directly to their inbox. An email with a link to the post in question would be ideal.
Is this possible?
Thanks!
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And yet again, Jetpack/Automattic have forgotten about the community. 😦
We have wanted the comment functionality since day 1 it got released, and we’ve not even received confirmation that it will be released whatsoever.
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Daniel,
Spot on!!! I’ve asked numerous times here how to control the email subscriptions. There have been many other folks asking this same question yet no SPECIFIC answer is given as to how and where the email addresses are stored and used.
It is pretty obvious there is a real need to be able to control the email subscriptions but I guess this request is not important enough…
Too bad.
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Daniel / bowtie: We haven’t forgotten about you at all. We also haven’t forgotten about keeping the millions of blogs on WordPress.com running smoothly, which is what you can faithfully assume we are doing when we’re not doing what you’d rather us be doing 🙂
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Sure, I can understand that. But you need to understand that we don’t care about wordpress.com since we are using self-hosted blogs. It’s like Apple saying to an iPhone-owner that they’re focusing on iMacs right now. That won’t make the iPhone-owner happier.
WordPress.com is great, and I’m sure you’re doing a swell job, but we have asked for the comment functionality (and other stuff) since day 1, and we haven’t received anything. And now it’s been almost 3 months without an update.
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So, seeing that there are 800K blogs using Jetpack, and a majority of the feedback here has to do with subscription management, why hasn’t anything been announced saying “we are working on it”, “It is coming soon”, etc… Seems like that is a pretty big deal to people (including myself). Any word on that Scott? Also, where can I find the email addresses for my subscribers? I figure they trust me (and not Jetpack – in fact 95% of them would think you were talking about the Rocketeer if they heard the word Jetpack). So why can’t I get the email address? Maybe you guys are working on this also…
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10x!! it helped me a lot.
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Two days ago notifications to subscribers working properly, but now can not reach. They confirmation notifications, subscribe perfectly, but when I write a post subscribers are notified. Is there a problem with jetpack? It’s very strange because I do not just happen on a blog. I tried on three blogs, one of them totally clean, freshly installed. Does anyone know anything about this problem?
It also works subscriptions to comment, but not when I write a new post.
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I can only see the latest 100 followers. When I click the button to see the second page of followers all that I can is a refresh of the first page. Is anyone else experiencing the same issue?
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I’m having the same issue, I left a comment in the forum but it’s “still awaiting moderation.”
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Has there recently been any inaccuracies in the number you see on the stats page and actual number of subscribers? I use Jetpack for my wordpress.org blog site.
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Did the question ever get answered here about where in the database the emails are stored? I really need more control over my own list of followers!
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Another problem I’m having with the plugin…I cannot see the entire list. I can only see the most recent 100 subscribers, and when I click on the page 2 button in the bottom right, it just reloads the first page-I cannot get to my first subscribers and I need to since I need to manually grab those names and switch to a manageable subscription widget. So why can I only see the latest 100 followers?
Secondly, the “search followers” function in the top right doesn’t work either. It produces no results and gives me no error message.
This is not a matter of me not knowing where to go to find my followers, I’m clear on that. Once I’m there, I’m limited to the 100 most recent followers and that’s a problem for me. Please help, I’d love to know the secret to seeing the full list of subscribers.
Thank you!
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Finally I found out how to view my followers/subscribers.
And Jetpack will be disabled for my blogs until I have full control over the lists!
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The “only 100 subscribers” bug has been fixe as of Jetpack 1.2.3.
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Great tip….thanks for the info…now i can find my subscribers!
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Question about subscriptions/followers:
If a follower has subscribed to website and receives posts as they appear do I get credit each time they get an email?
If not isn’t in my interest to disable that function?
If I’m trying to build clicks/site visits to a website what’s best advice re subscription widget?
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I’m curious. As a new self-hosted blog, I know of several people who are subscribing to my blog. But, JetPack gives me a big fat 0 for followers. Clues please?
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The follower number will depend on how they subscribe. If they subscribe by email using Jetpack’s subscription widget, they should show up under than number. If they subscribe by any other method, they will not show up.
The email subscription method also is a two step process; if a user does not confirm the follow, they won’t show up in the follower numbers you see.
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Thanks Tim! That answers my question. I use Feedburner. Now, I understand why I show zero.
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I have over 2.500 subscibers on my self-hosted blog.It would be great to be able to intergrate them all into Jetpak mailing list
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I also need to delete subscribers. I started with Jetpack, but found I had no control over the emails going out. I respect considering email sign-ups like RSS feeds… but what’s the point of equating the two – if a user wants to silently watch a blog, then they already have RSS? Email sign ups allow the blogger to control and tailor the information provided to the reader, unlike RSS. That’s kind of the point.
So, my case is I have 15 subscribers on Jetpack. I transferred them (manually) into MailChimp, and added 30 more subscribers (which I got from a physical sign-up list at an event) to MailChimp. Now I want to delete the 15 Jetpack subscribers and shift the whole list to MailChimp so they don’t get two emails…
But I can’t!
It seems like this may be a common desire for users. I feel my only option is to delete Jetpack which sucks, but I don’t know what else to do.
Greg
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I have been dealing with this issue for a long time. Jetpack nor Feedburner have the feature, no care about adding it, to manage subscribers. You cannot even import subscribers to your jetpack plugin. This is extremely frustrating. I have found that surveymonkey is the only solution. or feedblitz.
good luck!! IT’S a real pain, and defeats the purpose of the entire subscriber plugins. Especially if you are migrating a new server or site.
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We are investigating methods to allow import to Jetpack Subscriptions. We want to do this in the best possible way for both site owners, like you, and your subscribers. If we put in a quick importer, it would be too easy for spammers to take advantage of the service and the subscribers. Once we find a good solution, we’ll get it built into Jetpack for you.
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This would be really great along with a way to remove subscribers, I’m reluctant to include the Follow button on the soon to be published HTML5 version of Previous Magazine, but this is something I would like to integrate as I appreciate the way in which it works which is very slickly, although the subscribers for several other blogs we have are getting spammy and like another commenter said, we get spam in return to the emails we send out and that is frustrating.
I love the WordPress.com comment system by the way, this works so much better than what is available on .org, I’m not a fan of Disqus or any other service like that, but the release of the Facebook plugin has got me thinking.
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Please, please, please do it quickly. We are a school and we had to get signed permission from the parents to send emails to the kids plus a security copy to the parents. That’s some 2,500 email addresses and as subscribe2 can’t deal with that number, I’ve no idea what to do!! HELP
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I have a CSV file exported from my WordPress.com blog, I want to add these subscribers to my Jetpack subscribers list. Is there really no import function at this time? That seems like a huge oversight! These are people who have already subscribed to my blog at its previous location and want to receive updates.
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For WordPress.com users who migrate their WordPress.com blog to WordPress.org with Jetpack installed, we have tools to assist you. Please contact Support with your WordPress.com address and your new Jetpack-enabled address. Note that this is a permanent transfer.
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i like the way the plug in works for comment tracking (Notify me of follow-up comments via email.) and would appreciate a way to disable the button to follow every-post (Notify me of new posts via email.), since i use Subscribe2 for that… So please let me use this for just comments… Also is there anyway to see which comments each follower/subscriber is following in detail as well as to cancel comments a user has previously elected to follow?
TY
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For the comments, you can see a total number of followers per comment (or per post) by drilling down on the Jetpack -> Site Stats -> Subscriptions panel.
For the buttons, currently you can display beth or neither. I’ll pass this along to the development list. Thanks for the feedback 🙂
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Hello, there! Has there been any decision on whether or not there will be an added feature for Jetpack users, to manually have access to the subscribers in the database, as well as let us add, delete and edit this list? It is important for my company that we know, because we are at a point of making a decision to scrap Jetpack WordPress altogether if this issue is not resolved soon. Just a rough date would be good for now.
Many thanks for your support.
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The subscribers are not actually saved in your local database, so there will never be direct database access to the subscription records. We don’t have any solid deadlines that we can share on any updates, though we are always working on updates and fixes.
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What about on a wordpress.org site?
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These instructions are for WordPress.org sites that are using Jetpack.
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My “Jetpack site stats”, under “subscriptions”, shows the following:
Site Stats » My Followers (22)
Email Followers (18)
Why the discrepancy? Who are the other 4 followers (that is, 22 minus 18 = 4)? Are they users of WordPress following along in a wordpress reader? If so is there anyway to tell who they are?
Sorry if this is obvious, but I’m new to blogging and would like to understand this,
Thanks for your insight.
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This should be fixed now. There was as issue with the way the totals were being displayed on our end. Thanks for letting us know!
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Thank you! It was driving me crazy trying to figure the source of the discrepancy. I very much appreciate your fast response.
Jen
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I am switching my jetpack email subscribers over to subscribe2 but how do I delete them off of the jetpack and how do I get site stats from Subscribe 2? Thank you
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Please contact support@jetpack.me for help with this. Thanks!
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Is there a way to send a mass email to these followers? I’d like to send them news about the site from time to time.
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The only way to send email to these followers is publishing new posts on your site.
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Good stuff, but I wont use the subscription stuff until I have complete control over the list and probably after it incorporates with MailChimp and/or Mandrill. Our reputation as content providers and trust as list managers is at stake and from what I’ve been reading, things are not going smoothly with that lack of control.
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It is unlikely that Jetpack Subscriptions will be integrated with another system. As for control, we are still working on this. Thanks for the feedback.
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