Do not download!

Did you contact us with details of any error so that we can address it?

No, you did not

Had you done that, and then we’d ignored you, I could perhaps understand this rating, but you didn’t. Likely you’re running php 8.2.

So for anyone reading this nonsense, you can safely assume this is blatant malice, solely for the purpose of degrading our reputation.

Paul, I have no interest in destroying your reputation; not even one bit! Look at this from the client’s perspective. You download and activate your plugin and then you get a “critical error” on your website. What will be your first conclusion? See what I mean?

Your description of the plugin says nothing about compatibility issues with PHP8. That should be listed right at the top of the plugin description. I run an e-commerce website that generates money. I cannot afford to get surprises like this or have my website offline for even an hour!

I am more than willing to amend my comment, but attacking a client is bad for business. It takes months to gain a client’s trust, but only a second to destroy it.

My first conclusion would be: “wow, there’s a critical error. I’d better alert the team about that and see if we can get it fixed. Maybe they’re not aware? I’ll copy the error and send it along, hopefully they’ll fix it and what I did was helpful.”

There’s nothing wrong with our PHP 8 support. 8.0 and 8.1 are completely fine. 8.2 was basically released barely a few months ago. We are aware of a critical error for PHP 8.2, but that was released after our latest major release, and not many admins would be running PHP 8.2 at this time, so soon after its release, unless they’re technically competent to handle issues. It’s due to be addressed in our next release in the coming week or so.

If you can’t afford for surprises, then you should always install new plugins in a staging site. You also certainly shouldn’t be running PHP 8.2, or even 8+. WordPress currently recommends 7.4. Here’s a warning to that effect on dreamhost and also mentions a warning for php 8:
https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001331703-Upgrading-your-WordPress-site-to-the-latest-PHP-version

I have of course assumed your critical error is with 8.2, because I’m not aware of any others at this time and you never supplied details. As you can see by our release history, we are very quick to take on feedback and error reports and release patches.

Also, please elaborate on the “attack”? There was no attack on our part, just defense. Your review was an attack on our work, I responded to ensure that anyone reading it was fully aware that you hadn’t gone through any channels of support. We answer 99% of all support questions we get and are very responsive. But we don’t take kindly to “reviews” of that nature and will defend our position and ensure people that read such reviews have clear context to appreciate how they were derived.

@nvisagie I appreciate you updating your review. If you would like to try out our latest version which isn’t fully public, yet, you can manually download it from www.ads-software.com here:
https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/wp-simple-firewall.17.0.1.zip

We’ve done extensive testing and aren’t aware of any major issues with this yet, but please only try this if you’re comfortable disabling/removing the plugin if you spot a problem. It’ll resolve the issue with PHP 8.2.

Just to affirm usage, Shield does work for php 8.0

@nvisagie just updating you to let you know that version 17.0 is just released which has much better support for PHP 8.2