How To View Subscriber Info For Your Blog


stats.gifThe Subscribe To Comments 2.0 plugin by Mark Jaquith of txfx.net must be one of the most popular WordPress plugins. One of the current drawbacks of the current version which Mark is trying to fix in his upcoming 2.1 release, is the fact that blog publishers can’t see who has subscribed to their posts.

Although I’ve never been able to see my subscription stats, I’ve always taken it as a given that my readers were using it as I use the same functionality on many other sites to follow discussions even if I don’t actually join the debate.

Now with the View SubscriberInfo plugin you can finally see how many users are subscribing to your posts, and even which articles they’ve subscribed to. I was amazed to see how many users had subscribed to my posts – 225 users had subscribed to 271 different posts. Given that I’ve only written about 300 posts since my move from Blogware, I’m quite happy about this.
Features:

  • Easy administration via Admin menu
  • Displays all subscribed individuals and the posts they are subscribed to
  • Show basic stats wherever you like using a function call
  • Optional insertion of subscriber statistics into the Dashboard

Installation is a breeze. Just upload the plugin to your server and activate it. Once activated go to ‘Options/View Subscriber Info’ and decide whether you want summary stats like below displayed in your dashboard:

dashboard.gif

There is a very small bug in the current version. To get up-to-date stats you have to visit the Options/View Subscriber Info page TWICE.I’m tempted to send a nice email to users who have subscribed to posts, suggesting politely that they subscribe to my RSS feed if they haven’t already done so. Do you think this would be a bit too cheeky and an incorrect use of their email address?

More: MaxPower

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About the Author: Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 8 News, Windows 8 News and One Tip A Day.

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  1. Ajay says:

    I’ve been using Mark’s Script on which the plugin is based.

    Regarding emailing the users, as long as you are not abusing their email address I don’t think it cheeky.

    however, you must note that users are subscribed to the comments of a particular post and not your post feed itself.

    However, if you do decide to mail the users, please let me know their reaction, because I think it to be a good idea.

    I have 104 people in 170 posts and you need to visit the page TWICE only the first time.
    I’m gonna sit and clean up all the invalid email and posts.

  2. I fired off an email last night – I deleted the names I recognised. About a 1/3 of the addresses bounced back – I’ve had no feedback yet.

    I was very polite and told them how to unsubscribe, so the worst that can happen I think is they’ll unsubscribe from comment alerts, which isn’t that bad.

  3. Ajay says:

    That must be why I didn’t receive any email from you!?
    What did you use to send the emails?

    I guess i’m going to see a similar ratio. unforunately, you can’t bulk unsubscribe as of now. I hope to see that in the next version of Mark’s plugin.

    Offtopic: What plugins are you using for the Spam Protection and for the Page translator above?

  4. I just did a bit of tidying up in excel to extract the email addresses and used gmail.

  5. Math Spam protection: I’ve gone from around 700 spams indentified by akismet (the trackback validator is helping as well) to about 50, which means I can catch the false positives (avg. 1 a day)
  6. I used this translator plugin. I did buy the Augcrap one, but it killed my cpu
  7. The off topic questions would have been good ones for the forum! That’s why I created it so that users can ask questions that aren’t related to what I’ve posted

  • Ajay says:

    Will signup at the forum. I was thinking Aug’s plugin but I am worried about it killing CPU as you said.

    Going to be implementing Math Spam protection on Techtites

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