web site down – wordfence problem?

Is your Wordfence set to auto-update?
there seem to be some issues with the latest update, which came out a day or 2 ago.

Yes, it is. I tried renaming the plugins directory temporarily, but the symptom was the same.

have you tried switching Wordfence off?

Can you tell me how to do that through the godaddy file manager? I’m unable to sign in to wp.

not sure about godaddy but if you get similar to FTP access, what I would normally do is make a folder in /plugins called /not (or anyname other than used by WP).
then you can move things there temporarily. Try moving the wordfence folder from /plugins to /not

No change. I had also tried tried renaming “plugins” and creating an empty plugins directory – also no change. That should have turned off everything, right?

There’s also wordfence-waf.php in the wordpress root dir. Does that need to be removed or edited? Here’s the contents of that:

<?php
// Before removing this file, please verify the PHP ini setting <code>auto_prepend_file</code> does not point to this.

// This file was the current value of auto_prepend_file during the Wordfence WAF installation (Thu, 21 Apr 2016 01:38:14 +0000)
if (file_exists('/var/chroot/home/content/protect.php')) {
	include_once '/var/chroot/home/content/protect.php';
}
if (file_exists('/home/content/p/p/h/pphones/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/waf/bootstrap.php')) {
	define("WFWAF_LOG_PATH", '/home/content/p/p/h/pphones/html/wordpress/wp-content/wflogs/');
	include_once '/home/content/p/p/h/pphones/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/waf/bootstrap.php';
}
?>

• This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by TonyAndrews.

hmm not sure about that!
You can also try removing the themes apart from twenty-seventeen or another WP default one.
Thats the usual thing to check first, switch off plugins and try default theme. So yes, making an empty plugins folder should have switched them off.
With no Wordfence on, you still get the Wordfence error?
Did you check in a private/incognito as there could be caching when you are checking (especially when using Chrome)

Yes, same wordfence error with all plugins disabled. Just tried in an incognito window – same result. I also moved all themes (other than default) to a new subdir – no change.

strange. It looks like your php settings are referring to the wordfence-waf.php file (as it mentions in the file code) though not finding it, even though it is there?!

maybe try uploading Wordfence again? maybe it didn’t upload properly when updating?
otherwise not sure!

Ugh – I really don’t want to try a manual install of Wordfence and risk just making things worse. I’m a developer, but not a wp/php guy. I guess I’ll try GoDaddy support and see if they can help.

Hi @tonyandrews,

Please follow these steps in order to regain access to your site and reactivate Wordfence.

Also, one thing I would suggest is to upgrade PHP (or specify another PHP version to use, depending on your hosting provider); we recommend PHP version 5.6 or newer.

Let me know how you get on.

Renaming the plugin folder doesn’t change the symptoms. It doesn’t look like a normal Wordfence lockout. It looks like WF has added lines to my .htaccess file, should I remove those?

Hi @tonyandrews,

The lines in your .htaccess file, from # Wordfence WAF to # END Wordfence WAF were added by Wordfence during the optimization process.

Please see here how to remove the firewall setup manually.

After removing the firewall setup, try and set it up again within your WordPress admin pages

Yes, it was also the .user.ini file that needed to be reverted. Once I did that the site came back and I was able to reinstall Wordfence. It’s all good now.

Thanks for your help.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, @tonyandrews.

I’m glad you were able to get Wordfence up and running again!