MC Subscribe form not working after our account got “mandatory double-opt-in” fl
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TL;DR: Our account is flagged as having single-opt-in disalowed, but the signup form from the WP plugin is broken even though it’s double-opt-in. The plugin gives users success messages but never sends them the confirmation email.
This may be a bug in API or in the plugin, but either way the plugin is broken because users get a success message even though they are never sent the confirmation email.
WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE FLAGGED ACCOUNT
We sent out an email to a long-time list of people who requested to join the list or were added with consent, but which we haven’t used very often (last time was last May, when we had no problems with the MC system).
This time the system set off an alarm because 20% of subscribers were hard bounces. This must have been true last May as well but now it is causing huge problems.
Here’s what the email said about our punishment:
Your campaign, “XYZ_NEWSLETTER_NAME”, sent from the account with the username XYZ_ACCOUNT_NAME generated a high bounce rate of 22.00%.
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All contacts will need to complete the double opt-in process before they can be added to your audience. Imports to your audience and single opt-in subscriptions via signup forms and the API have been disabled for your account.
The first part seems to relate only to the XYZ_NEWSLETTER_NAME list, but the second part seems to relate to the entire account, which also includes a MUCH larger and more up-to-date list that we have set up in the WP MC plugin.
For the purpose of this report, we can ignore the XYZ_NEWSLETTER_NAME list that caused the problem, it isn’t set up in the WP MC plugin.
The problem is that right now signups to the other, bigger, regularly used list are totally broken when using the plugin, as described above.
WHAT WE EXPECT TO HAPPEN v. WHAT HAPPENS
What should happen:
– Plugin admin screen shows everything working fine
– Someone fills out the form and submits their email
– They get taken to the confirmation page and see a success message
– They get the confirmation email and confirm their subscriptionWhat happens:
– Plugin admin screen shows everything working fine
– They fill out the form and submit email
– They are taken to confirmation page with success message asking them to check their mail.
– No email arrives. They cannot confirm.IS IT THE API BLOCKING US?
It seems to me that the API is denying access to the plugin on some level, but the plugin doesn’t get the message and is dumb about showing the success message regardless of actually failing.
I can’t really think of explanations for this other than the flag on our account, since it worked fine previously.
This would be a bug, it seems, because the messages MC shows us about this flag on our account ONLY relate to single-opt-in via. the API:
> single opt-in subscriptions via signup forms and the API have been disabled for your account.
This doesn’t sound like it means the entire API has been disabled.
To be clear, both in the list settings on mailchimp.com, and in our plugin settings, the list that’s not working is set up as double-opt-in, and was already set up that way. So to my reading of the flag, the whole thing should still work.
We’re using the latest version of the plugin (which is ancient, and probably older than this system that flags lists with high bounce rates)
IS THIS A KNOWN ISSUE? SHOULD WE EXPECT THE API TO CONTINUE WORKING?
I am writing this up to have a place to reference when requesting assistance from MC personnel. I am not including identifying information about the list here but will share it privately with MC staff on request. It could be a weird problem with our account, but I suspect there’s a larger problem that could be experienced by others as well if they have their accounts flagged in this new way but were relying on new subscribers via. the WP plugin.
I am currently doing more research and trying to replicate the problem on a different site, but can’t get the form to work at all there unfortunately. I will reply here if I have more information.
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Okay to update I have done more testing to confirm that the problem is with the MC backend and not with our plugin setup. The results present a lot of evidence that the plugin is working fine, and even the API seems to think everything is working, but somewhere behind the API requests to join our list are dying on the vine.
Summary
– On a new, local WP site with the plugin installed everything worked fine with a new MC account’s API key
– On that same site, switching to our API key resulted in the same behavior seen on our live site: Submissions receive a “Success” message, but nothing happens and the confirmation email never goes to the requester
– I found the API logs for both accounts and compared them: They match exactly, despite the fact that our live API key doesn’t actually work, while the test one does.Testing with a test account WORKS
– I set up a vanilla WP site running totally up-to-date WP+Plugins
– Installed the official MC plugin we use on the live site
– Used API key from a small free personal MC account
– Attempted subscription using the form
– Got the confirmation email, confirmed subsciption and the email showed up in the audience (i.e. double-opt-in subscription worked)
– Checked the API logs ( https://us3.admin.mailchimp.com/account/api/ ) of the test MC account and it showed the API calls as successfulTesting with GV API keys FAILS but shows same success messages in API logs
– Tested the same thing on same setup, but with our actual API key from the account that’s causing problems
– Trying to subscribe shows the same success message
– BUT no confirmation email gets sent, subscriber can’t complete subscription, email doesn’t show in Audience
– Reviewing API logs shows the same results as the other API key that worked: The PUT commands are successful.
– Basically all API log fields match in both cases
– Red “X” marks are only there to indicate that the subscribed email wasn’t already in the database, so this is also effectively a success and it matches in both cases if I use a new email when testing the form.API logs show the same result whether on our site or on my local test site
– I tested both using our API key on the clean local setup and on our live server
– API log results matched exactly regardless of the site where the API key is usedWhat I take away from this
– The plugin currently works, and is probably working fine on our site
– The API connection between plugin and MC is working on our site
– The API requests themselves using our key are working as far as the API logs are concerned
– SO: It’s at some level behind the API that the requests are ignored.My guess: This situation with the flag on our account is the cause
– The flag is intended to block us from doing anything suspicious, and specifically to block non-double-opt-in-verification subscriptions
– Despite these requests all using double-opt-in verification, they are getting killed deep inside the MC system
– Because the API isn’t aware of this happening, it returns success messages and confuses the plugin
– This is probably due to the flag feature being relatively new.What we need now: Confirmation that this is happening, and a fix so we can subscribe users again
The warning messages we got did NOT say we were banned from the API entirely, so someone at Mailchimp needs to get this working again for us!
Thank you for your help.
Below: Screenshot of the two API logs showing how they both succeed even though the second one fails to send confirmation emails
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