Optimize the Wordfence Firewall not working for WP Engine?

Hello @rbrunskill. There shouldn’t be any blockers to using WF on WPE. Have you tried raising this through WF support? If you have a link to the other thread, I can check that as well for some more context.

This thread is what I was looking at:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/firewall-server-config-setting-for-wp-engine/

@wfdave indicates that mod_php should be selected.

Then @wfdave indicates that NGINX is the way to go.

Then @cwtmcmanus indicates he was told by WP Engine support to use apache + mod_php

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get either of these methods to take.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by rbrunskill.

@davidvee Do not use the WordPress Slack like that. I have archived your reply.

The WordPress Slack is exclusively for collaboration. It is not for any support channel. Please do not attempt to use it that way again.

@jdembowski – Noted.

@rbrunskill – You can email me the account information so I can look up / escalate the request. Firstname.lastname -at- wpengine.com. Here is a link to my .org profile with my first/last name. https://www.ads-software.com/support/users/davidvee/

Thanks for the offer, David. I’ve send an email with the account and site information.

If it proves to be something I’m doing wrong, or something that needed to be set in the configuration, I’ll post it here in case someone else has the same issue.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by rbrunskill.

This was confusion on my part. The development site was put together on WP Engine, but the actual live site is hosted elsewhere. Thanks to the folks at WP Engine for being as helpful as they could be.

Glad they could ~help @rbrunskill! For others who see this thread and do indeed need help with this on WP Engine, please feel free to open a support chat and we’ll help you out. Our senior leaders in our customer experience team have noted this in our internal documentation and can help customers resolve this issue ??

@davidvee Not sure what the secret is to getting help with this on WP Engine chat. I tried there and they said they won’t help with this issue.

Hmmm. Sorry to hear that. I can help escalate to see if I can get you help here. Mind emailing your account details to me?.. my first name dot last name at wpengine dot com

David Vogelpohl

So, it appears that this is now solved. For my case it was a setting that was thrown out of whack during the process of updating from the free to the premium version. I’m not sure if the problem is actually related to WPE or not, but in any case it’s solved.

For those that wind up here looking for a solution and happen to have the same issue I did I’ll add the following.

Export your wp_wfconfig table and search for wafDisabled.
Mine originally looked like this:
‘wafDisabled’, 0x31, ‘no’

After updating the table it looked like this:
‘wafDisabled’, 0x30, ‘no’

To update the value run the following SQL statement:
update wp_wfconfig set val = ‘0’ where name = ‘wafDisabled’ ;