Reduce bandwidth and increase security, the Wordfence 'blocked' page

  • When a bot or criminal is blocked, they are fed the Wordfence blocked page, /wordfence/lib/wf503.php. This page includes an email option, tells the criminal you are using Wordfence, and has PHP that delivers information about why page was blocked.

    If your site is getting thousands of attacks, it is loading this page thousands of times. It’s telling the criminals too much (why tell the criminal why their bot got blocked!?), giving them an email to spam, and triggering PHP that uses your bandwidth.

    Feature request: While it’s easy to customize this page, an option in the WF admin to “use custom blocked message” would be good. My customized page seems to get written over each time there is a Wordfence upgrade.

    (In Premium WF, the Country Blocking allows for a custom “blocked” page. Basically, the feature would be to have this type of feature on the WF Options page.)

    Personally, I stripped everything out of my custom wf503.php other than some text.

    MTN

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wordfence/

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  • Thank you for the feature suggestion. We already have this on our list but I don’t have an ETA when it might be available.

    Thread Starter mountainguy2

    (@mountainguy2)

    Ok, I hope you implement soon. Giving criminals less information and reducing server load are priorities. The default wf503.php page is a bit silly in my opinion.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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