Support » Plugin: Subscribe2 - Form, Email Subscribers & Newsletters » [Plugin: Subscribe2] Subscription / Unsubscription confirmation page text

  • Resolved markrand

    (@markrand)


    I’ve installed the plugin and got it working except for one thing. When the user gets their confirmation email with a custom link to confirm their subscription or unsubscription, it takes them to a page that the shortcode is inserting a title and stuff into. The page title for a person subscribing says “Subscription Confirmed” with nothing added in the body except another subscription text entry form with buttons to subscribe/unsubscribe.

    However, when the user has clicked the custom link in the email to confirm unsubscribing, the page is identical. An unsubscribing user is presented with a page title that says “Subscription Confirmation” and then an email entry form with a “subscribe” button (which they clearly don’t want) and an “unsubscribe” button (which they think they just did). Since some bad email unsubscribe confirmation pages force users to re-enter their email address and hit “unsubscribe” again, users are confused by seeing another email input form on a page that should only be confirming their unsubscription.

    My questions:

    a) is this actually the intended operation of the plugin?
    b) if so is there a way to change this behavior?

    Ideally, I would like the unsubscription confirmation page to only show a title and body that explicitly reflects “Unsubscription” (not “Subscription”) with no input form or buttons at all, since an unsubscribing user has no use for any of that and it is definitely confusing, with the potential for users to think they have to re-enter their email address and then getting an error message saying there is no such subscriber because they are already unsubscribed.

    The title on the subscription confirmation page is fine but I think the email input form and button(s) should also not display here. The user certainly doesn’t want to subscribe again (although they might think they need to fill in their email address again on this page to “confirm” their subscription, thus generating another error message). If they wanted to unsubscribe they wouldn’t have just clicked the link in the email that confirms subscribing.

    I’ve spent several hours at this but maybe there’s something I’m not understanding. I do understand that there is a “hide” option to hide one button or the other but not an option to hide both and the email input. I’ve also not found a way to change the text inserted into the page title but only for users confirming their unsubscription. Thanks for any help that anyone can provide.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe2/

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • @markrand,

    This is almost what’s supposed to happen, the website shold appear, the page should be selected, the page title should be repalced with “Subscription Confirmation” and the form should be replaced with a message that says “You have successfully subscribed!” or “You have successfully unsubscribed.”.

    It seems that for you the very last part is failing. What versions of WordPress and Subscribe2 are you using and does this re-produced if you disable all your other plugins?

    G’day, I agree with many of the things markrand said. I think it is a fabulous plugin, and I realise it is being maintained by a volunteer who is kind enough to share their work with the rest of us. So I can’t expect it to have everything I want.

    Nevertheless, I would like to record some suggestions just in case you want to take them up:

    • Some way of distinguishing between a Subscribe/unsubscribe page which we can get to via the Meta or Subscribe widgets, and the ‘You have successfully subscribed’ and ‘You have successfully unsubscribed’ pages, so there can be different messages on each.
    • This would require (I think) either the ability to alter the messages or having three separate pages.
    • The ability to unsubscribe directly from a link in the regular email advising of a new post, as most subscriptions allow.

    But regardless, thank you for making this available, it is better than Jetpack’s subscribe.

    @unklee,

    Some of this you can already do and some is not possible.

    Okay, for Subscribe and Unsubscribe. Create 2 pages, one to handle each. By using the ‘hide’ parameter in the subscribe2 shortcode you can hide the Subscribe or Unsubscribe buttons on the forms so it makes sense to your users.

    Then you can look at ‘excluding’ one or both of those pages from your list of pages in your theme by editing the call to wp_list_pages() in your theme to contain the exclude parameter as described here.

    Finally, if you place the Subscribe2 widget, in the widget preferences make sure this directs to your subscribe page and hide the unsubscribe button. All that should cover points 1 and 2.

    Your suggestion to have an unsubscribe link in outgoing emails is not possible. Subscribe2 is designed to allow a single email to be sent to many recipients using the BCC header. I could implement unsubscribe links in these emails but it would not be for the right recipient if BCC was used and would create far too much confusion and support requests among Subsribe2 users who didn’t implement the option correctly. That is why I’m not going to make it available as an option.

    MattyRob,

    Thanks so much, that was great and unexpected.

    I understand your wish to avoid support requests, and can accept the lack of an unsubscribe link in the outgoing emails more easily now that I can see the way forward for the separate subscribe and unsubscribe pages. In fact I could perhaps put a link in the standard email, not to automatically unsubscribe, but to the unsubscribe page.

    That would mean having only the subscribe button in the sidebar widget which links to a subscribe page with a welcome message and no button at all, and a separate sidebar link going to an unsubscribe page with an unsubscribe button and a goodbye message.

    So I’ll have to see if I understand what you have said well enough to do it, but I think I can do it.

    Thanks heaps. I’ll report back (if not for your benefit then at least for anyone else who finds this page via Google as I did).

    MattyRob

    Feedback for the record, in case anyone else benefits.

    Your instructions worked fine and I didn’t need to exclude the pages (the thing I was most unsure about) – I couldn’t see any reason for me to do so. So I:

    • Modified the subscribe page to have welcome text but no buttons.
    • Set up an unsubscribe page to have ‘farewell’ text plus an unsubscribe button.
    • Modified the dashboard widget to have a subscribe button only, plus a link to the unsubscribe page in the Post-content text.
    • Put a link to the unsubscribe page in the email text.
    • Styled the widget in my theme’s style.css.

    The only difficulty was styling. The Pre- and Post-content text does not have any styling (according to Firebug) and any styling I add in the widget boxes doesn’t work (despite a statement in an update – about 6.2 – that it does). So I had to style using div.search, #s2_form_widget-3 form, #s2_form_widget-3 p.s2_message and #s2_form_widget-3 p.s2_error. But once I figured those out (it took a little testing + Firebug) it was easy enough.

    So thanks a lot. I now have one click subscription (plus a second click on the subscribe email), two click unsubscribe, separate welcome and departure messages, and a link in the emails which go out after each post. Now all I need are a few more subscribers!

    Thanks heaps!

    MattyRob,

    I am having the exact same problem as reported by markrand.

    I am running WP v3.4.2 and subscribe2 v8.6.

    Here is a link to a screenshot of the confirmation page…

    Any help in troubleshooting would be very much appreciated…
    http://screencast.com/t/b4M4mOjKmsNa

    @jpmuofu,

    The same unanswered questions still remain for you as much as the OP then:

    What versions of WordPress and Subscribe2 are you using and does this re-produced if you disable all your other plugins (and revert to a default WordPress theme)?

    I included the WP and subscribe versions in my original post. (WP v3.4.2 and subscribe2 v8.6.)

    if I disable my other plugins this problem persists.

    @jpmuofu,

    And what about if you revert to a core WordPress theme?

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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