Wordfence interfering with phpbb discussion board

[BroIgnatius1]

The previous thread on this was not helpful. It recommending settings with wordfence, is a wordpress plugin, that is somehow interfering with a phpbb bulletin board, which nothing to do with wordpress. When I try to go into the administrative control panel (ACP) screen in phpbb, I get a wordfence error of “403 Forbidden: A potentially unsafe operation has been detected in your request to this site. Generated by Wordfence at Sun, 2 Jun 2019 16:31:06 GMT.”

This problem occurs with every phpbb board I have, even in different domains. I have tried to de-install all wordfence within a domain, I even reinstalled the phpbb, but the error still occurs.

What is happening and how is this fixed?

To see this error, go to the url provided:

Login with these credentials:

Username: Bro. Ignatius Mary+
Password: 7HU148JU

Click on the ACP button. Use the same credentials to re-authenticate.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by BroIgnatius1.

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

[wfdave]

Hi @broignatius1,

I would recommend against putting credentials here, as these forums are public.

The error in question 403 Forbidden is because Wordfence is detecting something strange in the request.

You can find out why this is happening by going into Wordfence -> Tools -> Live Traffic, find a row where it is blocked, and it should list why the connection was blocked.

If you can post a screenshot of the blocked row, I can guide you here on how to whitelist it.

Dave

[BroIgnatius1]

Dave:

People keep saying that, but the problem is on the phpbb that has nothing to do with wordfence. So which wordpress with that plugin do I make these adjustments. I have dozens of wordpress installations.

[wfdave]

Hi again,

Wordfence monitors all traffic, even outside of WordPress. PHPBB will allow users to post raw HTML content, and Wordfence sees that at potentially dangerous.

Did you find anything within Wordfence -> Tools -> Live Traffic?

Dave

[BroIgnatius1]

I checked the wordpress I have on the same domain as the phpbb. I went to the phpbb discussion board and tried to go into the Admin Control Panel. I got the wordfence error.

I then checked the live traffic. There is no mention of the phpbb attempt to go into the Admin Control Panel

[BroIgnatius1]

So what now?

How do I resolve this? The wordfence as been deleted on every wordpress installation on the domain, wordpress cache cleared, my browser cache cleared, and the error still comes up.

What is next?

[wfdave]

Hi again,

So if even after you removed Wordfence – you continue to see blocked messages, that means another plugins is blocking requests to PHPBB.

What you can try is disabling every other plugins one-by-one until it is no longer blocked.

However, if that doesn’t solve the issue, you may need to contact your host to see if they have any firewall rules set up on their end.

Dave