Completely Unacceptable

If you notice from the error message, you see the message that says ‘access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons’, which means you enabled country blocking and were likely a little too restrictive. In short, the block is because of a setting you enabled.

If you would like a refund, you are certainly entitled to one, however this is not the forum to do so. Open a request at https://support.wordfence.com and we can accomodate you. Or, if you would rather, we’d be happy to show you how to set that feature up correctly.

Per forum rules, I am closing this post out before the mods get angry. (sorry guys!)

tim

Excuse me?

I enabled country blocking to prevent specific countries from logging into the back end.

Not from displaying the site to readers from that country.

The fact that you’re accusing ME of the site going down when it’s obviously due to the update that was released is incredibly insulting.

And oh no poor mods getting angry. This is fully Wordfence’s fault so excuse me if I don’t care if they get upset. Adequate testing should have been done before the plugin update was released.

Hi Elise,

Just wanted to reiterate what Tim said. The message you received is not related to a bug we just fixed with the newest release as far as I can tell.

We’re most certainly not accusing you of anything. Just trying to help by giving you some data on what we think could be causing the issue.

We actually have a pretty good QA process in place and our developers also write unit tests to test the output of individual functions. However (and again I should note this is unrelated) but the bug yesterday’s release introduced was missed by our QA process, so we’re taking steps to improve the process to avoid that in future.

Let us know if we can help further – we’re happy to work the issue with you if you’d like.

Regards,

Mark.

This issue absolutely is related to the bug (and successfully took down my sites for 14-15 hours as well). In the country blocking options, the checkbox

“Block access to the rest of the site (outside the login form)”

is checked by default. So, if someone had unchecked this and blocked only the login form from many countries, then the bug kept all of those country boxes checked, but then rechecked the box to block access to the rest of the site. The bug caused one to go from blocking login access to most of the world, to blocking the entire site from the world.

For the OP, this issue is resolved by installing the new update, and going to country blocking and unchecking the block access to the whole website box. It certainly is not anything you did in incorrectly setting up country blocking; yesterday’s release reset this option for you.

@brighterfaster. I just verified you were correct. So this was bug related and has been patched in version 6.0.20 as you mentioned.

@elise.x I apologize if you felt I was blaming you, but as that related to country blocking I was trying to explain what happened, if obviously not in a good way though.

Still, this is a paid feture that we aren’t allowed to really discuss in the free forums per www.ads-software.com rules. Please open a support ticket in the link I provided so I might be able to help you further.

tim

@brighterfaster Thank you for this. Followed your instructions and everything is now back to normal (as far as I know). Wasn’t going to risk playing with the options without knowing what went wrong considering the site had been down for so long already, so thank you for the straightforward response, which helped me to get everything running smoothly in seconds.

Came here looking for something else, but had to comment — shi* happens! This sucks for sure, but I wouldn’t put you guys on the cross for it. Awesome plugin you got going here, I’ve been using it for years and I love it. Sounds like elise.x is out for blood though lol…maybe she’s a vampire? Anyways, sure glad she’s your problem to deal with and not mine ??

Thanks all, this kind of data is very valuable to us. Elise, sorry we doubted you – thanks for bearing with us on this. Hopefully you’ve opened a ticket and Tim, Colette or another member of our team is taking priority care of you.

Regards,

Mark.

I am not convinced that we are done with this issue.

To the best of my knowledge, the setting “Block access to the rest of the site (outside the login form)” is OFF by default. However, Wordfence suddenly turned it ON in my sites — an enormous problem.

If I am correct in saying that this setting is OFF by default (it would be bizarre to have it ON by default), then this is an entirely different bug.

Furthermore, Wordfence: Please, when important issues arise such as this, do not simply make an announcement on Facebook and Twitter. Your users (and especially paying subscribers) deserve the courtesy of an email.

At the risk of repeating what I said in another post, I believe I speak for many users when I say that there is a good chance that we are not “following” you on social media. We use security software so that we can “set it and forget it”. If there is an issue that you should be disclosing (especially one such as this), get a message directly to our in-boxes, so that we can take action and fix our sites.

Hi @earshell,

I’ve checked and “Block access to the rest of the site (outside the login form):” is actually on by default. So yes in this case it reverted to default setting.

Thanks for your additional feedback. We’ll add it to our internal discussions.

Also just want you to know that we did see your cross-post here:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/latest-update-turning-on-settings-that-were-uncheked?replies=2

Regards,

Mark.