Users are blacklisted – latest whitelist IP not working

If you have deactivated the plugin, and the user cannot still login, then it has removed our plugin as the source of the problem. Something else is causing it.

Student 3 was finally able to login with Simple Security Firewall deactivated. I had her clear cache.

Any ideas why users with current login credentials are suddenly blacklisted?

It doesn’t block credentials… there’s no reason why it would work for 1 and not another. It could well have been a caching issue… especially given that you got the same behaviour with the plugin on and off.

I don’t know why only some students, who’ve previously logged in successfully, are having their IP addresses blacklisted.

I don’t know why only some students, who’ve previously logged in successfully, are having their IP addresses blacklisted.

What errors are they seeing exactly?

Could you turn off your caching plugin to eliminate this from the equation, please? There’s no way to know at the moment if they’re seeing a cached page, or the plugin is the source.

Student 1 who was first to be blacklisted saw the webhost generic error page.

Student 3 saw “no username exists” and “incorrect password” even though at the same time, I was able to login with Student 3’s username and password.

The blacklisting was from the plugin for Student 1 and 2. Using the plugin to whitelist their IP addresses solved the problem.

For student 3, whitelisting the IP did not solve the problem.

Are you running any other security plugin? We don’t have an error in the firewall with anything relating to “no username exists”.

This isn’t blacklisting. If the user was blacklisted, then they’d received a 500 error page stating they had been blocked – it wouldn’t be showing any generic webhost error page. There are other things going on here and it’s not this plugin… there are too many user experience inconsistencies here.

The Firewall doesn’t concern itself with the password, or the username, used to login and wouldn’t be responsible for those errors.

If your users received a page stating they had been blocked by the Firewall, then, and only then, would white listing an IP address be applicable. Any other errors are not pertaining to this plugin.

There is either caching involved, and / or other security plugins, and / or other plugins modifying the login flow.

No other security plugin. Thanks for detailing the issues with different “errors” received by students.

What we do know is that it is IP based. Students 1-3, when they could not login from their IP, I was able to login using their respective credentials, from my IP.

Very strange.