How to unblock a single IP out of a block

Hi @tgoedde, thanks for your question.

Generally, we consider a manual blocking regime unnecessary as it can be time consuming to keep up with current URLs and IP ranges when they have been reassigned to potentially legitimate visitors etc. Wordfence should protect you from known “bad” IPs, User-Agents, referers etc. and now considers the intent of a human/bot by the pages they’re trying to visit (and how) the most important factor when blocking.

If your site is being hit many times from one specific IP (or range) over and over, I can understand why you’d want to stem the flow yourself at the time. It might be the best deterrent to increase the time they’re blocked before they can retry to days or months in your Brute Force and Rate Limiting settings. This should also catch fewer legitimate visitors in the wake of a block aimed at malicious ones.

I say the above because allowlisting an IP for any reason means it can bypass all Wordfence protection entirely, which could be problematic in future if it’s not a static address.

Thanks,
Peter.

The person I have had to whitelist twice because his revolving VPN IP address falls into a string of IP blocked by Wordfence because it fell into a “known malicious” list. I can’t even find his IP address in the current block list. When I search for it manually it doesn’t show up. So I can’t find where his IP is to unblock it. But to release his one address, I’d have to release the whole string of them. And the next time he tries to view our site he will be on another VPN IP. Makes me concerned how many other people are getting lock outs that we don’t know about and they move on to our competitors website.