deleted WF, found/deleted wordfence-waf.php, now site not loading

Hello Toni,
could you check in the root of your server and look for two files, .htaccess and .user.ini. In them look for a definition like this

; Wordfence WAF
auto_prepend_file = '/xx/xx/public_html/wordfence-waf.php'
; END Wordfence WAF

Delete those rows from the file/s and your site should start working again.

Ah! wished I had waited. I am in the process of restoring my MultiSite from a backup. Thank you for responding today.

Cheers!

Looks like I still do need this. Thanks again.

Hello Toni,
I’m setting this to resolved for now. Let me know if you are still having issues in which case we can open the thread again.

wfasa

I’m using WordFence across quite a few sites and it’s great; however, with this new wordfence-waf.php, even if I delete or disable the plugin wordfence, it remains and when I migrate sites/launch sites, within the file it points to old directories that it doesn’t have access too thus causing a 500. Could you add support where if the plugin is disabled or at the very least deleted, it would automatically remove that file from .htaccess and .user.ini? It would make my life a lot easier and I’m sure that others are going to have this same problem in the future too. Thanks:)

Hello onlineth,
We have discussed this and there should be a fix coming up. We will be adding this feature to the “Wordfence Assistant” plugin. I will add your request to our list though. Thanks for reporting!

Great, thank you

Hello again onlineth,
I forgot to mention that if you check “Delete Wordfence tables and data on deactivation” at the bottom of the options page before deleting they are supposed to be removed automatically. Have you tried that?

For what it’s worth – on my version of WP Multisite, I cannot get anything on the WordFence Options page to save. So checking that box to delete files after WordFence is uninstalled, does nothing for me. I could let it sit with the spinning spokes for an hour and it would not have saved by then.

Also, for some reason, the WordFence assistant plugin I tried, ALSO does not do anything to the db files for WordFence on my multisite install.

So I deleted them manually, and edited my .htacess file so I wouldn’t get the wordfence-waf.php error.

I’m having the same problem after deletion of the wordfence plugin.

I found no traces of wordfence in the .htaccess, but deleting wordfence-waf.php causes an error 500 everywhere.

I do not have access to user.ini.

Is the wordfence assistant my solution?
EDIT: Yes ?? I installed wordfence assistant and there was an option to remove the firewall. All OK.

xberg, make sure you check for hidden files too (both the .htaccess file and the .user.ini file are hidden)