Fraudulent. Do not take their advice about Twitter Social Sharing

  • Had no problems with this excellent service until their advice via my plugin page to sign up for another account. Supposedly Newsharecounts or Opensharecounts would keep track of my Twitter social shares. Signed up yesterday. Beginning last night I started getting spam for web development from random people and addresses, which are not being filtered by Gmail.

    Not hard to trace the source, and now I have no idea how to opt out. I no longer trust Social Pug. You shouldn’t either.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Contributor iova.mihai

    (@iovamihai)

    Hey @doublefire,

    Thank you for providing this rating, even if it’s a negative one.

    The claim that you are making might be a serious issue for hundreds of thousands of users. OpenShareCount is a system that many other social media plugins use, not just Social Pug. Could you please provide more detail about this?

    You’ve mentioned “Not hard to trace the source”. Could you please detail how you’ve traced this down to OpenShareCount and Social Pug? I would like to prevent such an issue from ever happening again for the plugin’s users.

    I’ve also reached out to OpenShareCount for a response regarding this claim.

    Looking forward to your reply!

    Best regards,
    Mihai

    Thread Starter doublefire

    (@doublefire)

    Hey @iovamihai,

    I was updating my plugins on my website and I saw the notification from Social Pug to sign up for OpenShareCount so that I could still get my shares on Twitter reported. I followed the link, and didn’t research the advice to sign up, though I should have. Social Pug has been a fine plugin and I took your word for it that your recommendation had been vetted (not smart; next time I’ll research the recommendation).

    I filled out the sign up forms. About 6 hours later, I began to get emails delivered to my inbox (not filtered as spam or promotions, so the notifications showed up in my mobile notification center in the middle of the night) for people seeking work as web developers and offering to give me quotes on SEO things.

    I can screenshot these emails if you’re interested.

    The only thing that I can pinpoint as being the source for these spammy emails, which I’m still getting, but they’re now being filtered to spam, is that sign up to OpenShareCount. Unless GoDaddy is now in the business of selling my email address, but I’ve been with them for years and haven’t had problems. If you have another idea, let me know. I could be wrong. I’m not a web developer and I’m willing to accept that I might have made a mistake in the source of the problem.

    Doublefire

    Anymore responses to this claim?

    Plugin Contributor iova.mihai

    (@iovamihai)

    Hey @dealsout,

    Sorry for the late reply, I haven’t received any emails for this thread unfortunately.

    Regarding OpenShareCount, it has shut down since this discussion started and Social Pug is no longer connecting in any way to them.

    But even before they shut down I haven’t had any issues, nor other users reporting anything suspicious with them.

    All the best,
    Mihai

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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