Ouch! | Unknown File in WordPress Core | WP 6.7

??? (re the b**tard file)

• This reply was modified 1 week, 1 day ago by Wordfence Security.

Thank you, Mark, for the clarifications!
Thank you, Jason, for making me try your solution and thus, by coincidence,.solve the problem.

I apparently missed a few vital messages on here between when I started that Reply and when I hit Submit! LOL

First, Mark, @mmaunder, I want to say thank you for doing what you do. I’m sure that your job is incredibly stressful to say the least. I’m sure you had a really sh1+ morning, to say the least and I would probably be a little “rough” as well.

While I know no one asked for my 2 cents, I’m gonna give it. I was 1 of many people in an un-caffeinated, foggy panic this morning and Jason @viablethought hopped in and surely prevented LOTS of people from ruining their whole day by doing something stupid like deleting their half their core files, incorrectly assuming they had been hacked and “there were no other options to click…” We’re talkin’ people who don’t even know what FTP is, let alone how to log in and use it to fix such a screw-up.

All these mom n’ pop shops, the family-owned, the 1-5 employee businesses – they rely on the goodness of people like Jason @viablethought to give them guidance when they’re experiencing tech nightmares. While the “fix” he gave was apparently just a coincidence, it certainly didn’t do any harm to anyone. To put him down in any way, or really, to do anything other than thank him for hopping in to quell the panic and prevent folks from doing something that’ll take them all day to fix (or cost them a week’s worth of profits to pay to have fixed), while there was total radio silence from Wordfence re: the matter.

I just really, really highly doubt that his suggestion to go update Firewall rules would “significantly increase our support load as we have to correct the misunderstanding you’ve created”. That just seems really far fetched, not to mention just kinda crappy.

Allow me to retry this for you.

Dear Jason @viablethought,

Thank you so much for trying to help people out while we were working on the fix and writing a response or announcement acknowledging the problem. Sorry we weren’t able to get a note up sooner. While your suggested fix was a good shot, it was actually just a coincidence. Here’s what actually happened: techy stuff, rate limiting repo…

We appreciate your suggestions and we are listening to the feedback that you and others have provided.

Thanks again for hopping in and preventing people from hitting the “Self Destruct” button on their websites!

– What Wordfence (specifically Mark) should have said

Hi @abuzon,

Great input. I second what your stated. Wordfence needs to get off its pedestal and start appreciating what customers do for them – such as what @viablethought did. He helped many customers — and much faster than Team Wordfence did.

Whether they have 1 million or 1 billion customers, it doesn’t matter. In this case, Team Wordfence failed to test their plugin properly prior to claiming it conforms to WP 6.7. Nobody is perfect, including me and our team. Lesson learned: Let’s work together to make Wordfence better prior to pointing fingers or throwing somebody under the bus.

Cheerio!

Thank you @abuzon and @generosus for the kind words, it is greatly appreciated!