[benecaster_follower_signup]

Renders an email signup form that lets listeners follow your show for free. Followers are distinct from both paying subscribers and free-tier membership-plugin members: they require no membership plugin, no paid tier setup, and no Benecaster license — this shortcode works with the free WordPress.org version of the plugin.

Use it to start building a direct listener list before you’ve set up any subscription infrastructure, or alongside a paid tier as a low-friction “stay in touch” option that doesn’t require listeners to create a full membership account.

A follower gets their own tokenized feed URL, and that feed carries your public feed’s episodes. The token is what makes the feed theirs — per-follower download numbers, and the ability to revoke one person — not a key to extra content. Followers cannot see paid-tier episodes, and there is no per-episode follower setting to configure.

If you already have a membership plugin configured with a free tier, that tier serves the same audience — follower signup is most useful when you have no subscription plugin or want to bypass its registration flow entirely.

Collecting followers is entirely optional. Nothing captures a listener’s email address unless you place this form yourself, and there is no setting to switch on elsewhere that starts collecting them quietly. If you would rather not run a list, leave the shortcode off your site and the feature does not exist as far as your listeners are concerned. Passing those addresses on to a mail platform is a further, separate choice — it happens only if you install the Email Marketing Integrations add-on and connect a list to it, or if you build your own integration against the follower signup hooks. Nothing leaves your site until you set one of those up.

Each follower occupies one slot in your plan’s total token pool (the same pool shared with paying subscribers and free-tier members). They do not count toward your paying subscriber limit, but they do count toward your plan’s total token cap.

Wall name field: When the show has Supporter Wall enabled, an optional “What name would you like on our supporter wall?” field appears below the email input. Submitting with a value sets the subscriber’s wall display name immediately. Leaving it blank is valid — the subscriber can set it later from their account page. Pre-filled with first name + last name if the visitor is already logged in with those fields set; otherwise blank.

No password field. This form is email-first: it collects a name, an email, and — when the Supporter Wall is on — a wall name. Nothing else. A password POSTed to it anyway is dropped before it reaches the signup handler.

The follower is provisioned with a password nobody knows, and the welcome email carries a single-use signed link that signs them in and lands them on their account page. They can set a password there whenever they like; they never need one to listen.

⚠ This is now different from [benecaster_subscribe], which still does collect a password. The two forms no longer follow one rule, so do not justify either by pointing at the other.

Three states, not two.

1. A logged-out visitor sees the form. On submission Benecaster creates a WordPress user
   for the address if one does not exist, issues a follower token, and sends the welcome mail. An address that already follows the show gets the already following mail instead — no second token, no repeat welcome.

2. A signed-in visitor sees no email input and no name input. The form reads “Follow as
   {their email}” and one click provisions the token. ⚠⚠ No email is sent at all on this path — document that plainly, because a podcaster testing their own form while logged in will otherwise report the welcome email as missing. In exchange, the full feed URL is printed on the success screen, and that is the only place it can ever appear for them: the plaintext token exists only at generation, and every other surface shows it masked. ⚠ The success_message attribute does not apply to this state.

3. A signed-in visitor who already follows sees “You’re already following this show —
   nothing has changed.” plus a link to their account. No token, no mail.

⚠⚠ The identical-response rule is unchanged and must stay. For a logged-out submitter, a brand-new address and an address that already follows produce the same screen. The difference lives only in the mailbox, where only the address’s real owner can see it. Erroring on a known address would turn the form into a way of testing which addresses are registered. A submission refused by the abuse limits shows this same screen too, having sent nothing.

Email marketing integration: When the Email Marketing Integrations add-on is active, new followers are automatically synced to your connected list (Mailchimp, Kit, ActiveCampaign, etc.) using the same benecaster_token_generated hook as paying subscribers. The add-on can be configured to tag followers separately from paying subscribers.

Output filterable via benecaster_follower_signup_output — the filter receives the rendered HTML, show ID, resolved attributes, and render state (form, success, or error).