last rules update for the Wordfence Web Application Firewall was unsuccessful

I’ve been having the same problem since updating Wordfence a few days ago.

Manual updates fail. All diagnostics appear to be ok

Yeah still the same for me.

Anyone help with this?

Hi @itguynw, thanks for reaching out to us.

If the “manually refresh…” button isn’t suppressing the message, in your FTP or hosting file manager, navigating to your wp-content/wflogs folder and checking for rules.php can show you the last modified date on this file. If it’s 0kb in size or the last updated time matches what Wordfence is saying, you should be able to delete the wflogs folder or its contents entirely and Wordfence should try to repopulate it within 30 minutes.

It’s also worth checking that in addition to 755 permissions on your WordPress site’s directories, the process owner is also www-data.

If you have persistent problems with this file/folder but don’t see connectivity or permissions failures/error messages in your Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics page, you can bypass this entirely by setting Wordfence to write to the MySQLi storage engine instead of a file: https://www.wordfence.com/help/firewall/mysqli-storage-engine/

I hope that helps you out.

Peter.

Why would it suddenly stop after a Wordfence update? It was fine before the one around the 10th May?

Thanks, this worked for me. The files in that directory were updating with the exception of “rules” stuck on 9 May. The warning is now gone.

Hi @itguynw,

There’s no reason I’m aware of why a Wordfence update alone would cause the issues you saw, but if there has been an error read/writing the location or the file itself was inadvertently corrupted due to access issues during the update process then it may have resulted in manual action being required to clear the folder.

You can also check for permissions issues in your Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics page, but if everything worked before then I don’t necessarily expect to see any issues in this area.

Thanks,

Peter.