Medium’s Email List Not Working? And other Medium bugs.

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I’m trying to publish a story and send it to subscribers but Medium’s email list feature doesn’t seem to be working.

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Update 1/19/2023 — got my medium email today so that problem seems to be resolved. Hope they can fix the others.

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I have enabled email list functionality and you can subscribe here. I published a few posts recently and I didn’t see the related email so I tested a bit more. I subscribed to my own feed with some alternate emails just to see if the email functionality was working because I wasn’t getting or seeing the email.

I published a couple of new posts and chose the option to send to subscribers but did not get the emails.

I also had some friends try subscribing to see if they got the emails — nope. No luck.

I have had a number of problems with Medium lately and I hope they can fix them soon or validate that they are not issues, if they believe that to be the case:

• The paywall is too easy to bypass. If you think you’re making money off that you’re not. Medium’s bug bounty specifically excludes this. How are people supposed to make money on your platform?
• There’s no way to turn off RSS. People are blatantly copying my content using RSS feeds.
• Sometimes when I publish it says that someone else is publishing my post and I can’t publish it.
• I need to do some additional integrity checking to see that my posts are not being changed by a third-party after publishing as I’ve had some strange things happen — but there’s a chance that could just be me. I would need to do more testing with file integrity checking to prove it.
• Other people are essentially jumbling the words of my posts and re-publishing on Medium. It could be that these are just ChatGPT bots but I’m not sure. It’s not clear how Medium is going to fight that problem. Challenging, indeed.
• Formatting on Medium changes periodically and breaks things I’ve published in the past.
• There’s no way to do certain things like tables, which are essential to communicate certain ideas — without linking out to some other Excel-like platform.
• Medium may have some caching issues. I try to publish and my changes sometimes won’t show up until I try to force the cache to update. I hope that attackers are not able to change the content of stories using the cache. That would involve integrity checks with what is in the cache and the original post, which I hope Medium is doing.
• No matter what I publish, I get $2. My hits went up over 5,000 and I got many more subscribers, reads, and claps and I still got $2.
• When I tried to log into my linked Stripe account, something is wrong with it. Since I only get $2 I haven’t been paying attention to it. I’m going to need to revisit that to see that there is not some problem with Stripe or Medium in that regard. I don’t recall seeing my payouts lately but I need to double check. Hopefully Medium has performed proper penetration testing on this aspect of their platform and Stripe has done their part as well. The points of integration are tricky, since who can really an allow the pentest in that case? Something for the two companies to consider.
• I had issues with blatant reposting of the conent in my blogs onto other sites by repubishing the RSS feed. The author claimed that the problem was the way the Medium RSS feed works, which is incorrect and broken. I don’t know if that is true. I hope that Medium can do more to help authors with plagiarism. That makes it worthwhile to post on Medium.

Overall, I like the simplicity of Medium and I use it to convey thoughts. It is definitely not a platform for making money, and unfortunately I am not sure about the reliability of the platform at the moment.

Follow for updates.

Teri Radichel | © 2nd Sight Lab 2023

About Teri Radichel:
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⭐️ Author: Cybersecurity Books
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⭐️ Education: BA Business, Master of Software Engineering, Master of Infosec
⭐️ Company: Penetration Tests, Assessments, Phone Consulting ~ 2nd Sight Lab

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