Lockout LockDown No Joy And a LOT of Hassle

  • Up until May 18th, I would get about 3 alerts per day indicating that my hosting provider (IP xx.xx.xx.xx) was locked out of my website for too many attempts to access a file that does not exist.

    Furthermore, the plugin blocks Googlebot, MSNbot, Yahoobot… essentially it causes your organic rank to plummet.

    After reading, I can see this is a major bug in iThemes Security.

    Now, I’m getting locked out of my own site about 3-4 times per day, with an inability to access it using my login ID.

    The impression I get is that iThemes placed into circulation an pre-alpha release of this product, charged for the premium product, used the money generated to turn it into a beta product, and so on and so forth.

    You don’t release plugins that cause this much grief to people. It should have been tested for 6 months prior to release with real blog sites. When you invent a new drug, do you test it out on human babies before doing preclinical tox and testing on animals?

    So what do you get with the paid version, Xanax, or perhaps a steel shovel to render yourself unconscious until it’s all over?

    This plugin has potential, however the way it was introduced is inexcusable.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • That’s an interesting point about the bot-blocking. I wonder if the developer would care to respond to this? I haven’t really noticed that happening, myself.

    Your point about it needing to be tested for six months: It has been out for over a year, and has worked really well on a number of websites that we’ve been using. It has been pretty helpful to us in pointing out a few missing/expected files that we didn’t know about — yes, I’ve been locked out of my own site for a few times, but it turned out it was my own fault because I had a missing graphic or two, and when I fixed that, I was no longer blocked. So I think a good bit of testing has gone into this.

    Handoko

    (@handoko-zhang)

    Bot blocking may happen if both you turn on the 404 protection and the website has deleted/moved graphics/links.

    @lennoxtutoring:
    You may try to disable the 404 protection to see if it fixes the issue. But for actually solve the problem, you really need to find the source of the 404 error and fix it.

    I personally don’t suggest anyone to turn on 404 protection. Because it may block some legit visitors and good bots. I monitor 404 errors myself and if I found any IP frequently causes the error, I will ban it manually. I use Bad Behavior plugin, which is good for blocking most bad bots, spammers, scanners and hackers.

    This plugin deserves more than 1 star. It’s a good plugin, I used it. But until I found a better alternative: All In One WP Security & Firewall, which has less trouble and good support from the authors.

    Juba

    (@brightonseo)

    I’m still using the old version before IThemes took it over.
    It works great with no bugs or glitches.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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