wpDiscuz Subscription Manager Addon

An unconfirmed subscription is an address, not a subscriber

You look at the list of people who asked for alerts on your comments and you do not know how many of those emails really wanted them. Someone typed an address, the system sent a confirmation link and nobody clicked it. The row exists all the same.

The number of rows in a subscription list does not measure your audience, the state of each row does. Two lists with the same total can describe very different audiences depending on how many rows are confirmed and how many are still waiting.

wpDiscuz Subscription Manager is a wpDiscuz add-on that adds a subscriptions screen to the Comments menu. Each row shows the email, status, date, post and subscription type, and from there you can confirm, cancel or unsubscribe.

A list with status, type and date

• List columns: subscriber email, status, date, post title and subscription type.
• Numeric statistics about the subscriptions on the same screen.
• Row actions: mark as confirmed, cancel the confirmation, unsubscribe and send an email to the subscriber from a pop-up window.
• Sorting and search: sort by email, status, date or post title, and search by email or title.
• Filters: by status (confirmed or awaiting confirmation), by type (post, all comments or this comment) and by date.
• "Older than" filter, from 30 days to 5 years, and up to 999 items per page.

The list covers guest and registered-user subscriptions made with the three wpDiscuz options: new comments on a post, replies to all my comments and replies to one specific comment.

Clearing old pending subscriptions in one pass

A use you should test on your own site before deleting anything: removing the subscriptions that were never confirmed and have been sitting there a while. The result depends on how many pending rows you have.

1. Open the subscriptions screen and filter by the awaiting confirmation status.
2. Add the age filter you prefer, for example the 30-day one.
3. Use "Delete all filtered" to remove at once the records that match the active filters.

To avoid repeating the cleanup, a settings tab deletes every day the subscriptions and follows older than a number of days you choose, all of them or only unconfirmed ones.

What is missing from the screen

Among its functions there is no sending email to several subscribers at once: the message is written for one, from each row's window.

• Among its functions there is no sync with newsletter services and no export of the table.
• Among its functions there is no setting to change the type of a subscription already created, or to subscribe commenters by default.
• Among its functions there are no post update alerts: it manages comment subscriptions, not a newsletter.

Getting started on top of wpDiscuz

It needs wpDiscuz installed, because it manages the subscriptions that plugin generates. It installs like any WordPress plugin.

1. Install and activate wpDiscuz, then the add-on.
2. Open the subscriptions screen in the Comments menu and check that the existing subscriptions appear.
3. Open the Subscription Manager tab in the wpDiscuz settings to configure the automatic cleanup.

Alternatives inside and outside wpDiscuz

The subscription options themselves live in wpDiscuz; the add-on only administers what that plugin collects. If you want to lead commenters toward a newsletter list, the catalog has Newsletter Subscribe on Comments.

Questions about subscribers and alerts

Does it also manage guests?

Yes. The list includes subscriptions from guests and registered users made with wpDiscuz's subscription options.

Which subscription types does it tell apart?

Three: new comments on a post, replies to all of a person's comments and replies to one specific comment. The type filter separates them.

Can a user see their own subscriptions?

Yes. The Your Subscriptions screen, under the Users menu, is sorted and managed like the main list.