[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What is this user doing?
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       Ask HN: What is this user doing?
        
       Between Nov 20 and Dec 14, someone with the IP address 34.66.115.47
       has submitted 16 requests to join my email newsletter on my website
       form with nonsense email accounts like mphtnarrwqrs@gmail.com and
       qrzqoiakkubp@gmail.com. In one instance they used a real email
       address, so I have their name and know the company they work for
       (which is in my industry and we actually have mutual colleagues).
       What could this person possibly be doing with all these weird form
       submissions? I have a very basic, static website, do no A/B
       testing, and haven't made any updates to it in months. What do you
       think?
        
       Author : lai-yin
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2021-12-18 22:23 UTC (37 minutes ago)
        
       | Flankk wrote:
       | That's really strange. Only thing I can think of is the person is
       | using multiple throwaway email accounts to join your newsletter.
       | They are then marking all your messages as spam in an attempt to
       | get your email blacklisted. Hopefully someone has a less
       | malicious explanation.
        
       | mtmail wrote:
       | Does your newsletter have a "Welcome user number 1234"? or
       | similar, like a number in the URL? Ages ago I used a similar
       | approach to gain data on growth of a website. They would increase
       | a number in the URL for every (shopping) checkout session, easy
       | way to figure out if there was growth or not.
        
         | lai-yin wrote:
         | Thanks for the suggestion. There is no visible counter on the
         | webpage for users to see, and I'm not seeing one when I look
         | under the hood in DevTools. I could be missing something
         | though. It still would be odd since given my industry and where
         | this user works, I don't see much incentive for him to track my
         | subscriber growth.
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-18 23:00 UTC)