Wordfence is Telling Me that I Created Too Many 404s

  • Resolved Zabaan

    (@zabaan)


    9 years, 4 months ago

    Hello,

    I was just locked out of my site for creating too many 404s:

    ———–
    “Your access to this site has been limited

    Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503)

    Reason: Exceeded the maximum number of page not found errors per minute for humans.”
    ———–

    After regaining access to my site, the strange thing is that within ‘Live Traffic’ I went to the ‘Pages not Found’ tab and seem to be seeing myself here:

    Seattle, United States tried to access non-existent page https://www.zabaan.com/apple-touch-icon.png
    7/17/2015 5:49:33 PM (46 minutes ago) IP: 76.121.104.26 [block] Hostname: [….]
    com.apple.WebKit.WebContent/10600.7.12 CFNetwork/720.4.4 Darwin/14.4.0 (x86_64)

    At least I’m assuming that this is me since the time matches when I was testing some pages on my site and I am here in Seattle and then I was blocked. What I don’t understand is how is this possible as I certainly wasn’t visiting pages that don’t exist (i.e. I wasn’t trying to visit https://www.zabaan.com/apple-touch-icon.png over and over again).

    Any thoughts on what could have happened here?

    Thank you!

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

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • I had the same issue from a while but I fixed it by changing it in the options page.

    Plugin Author WFMattR

    (@wfmattr)

    Zabaan,

    In your Wordfence Options page, you probably need to set “If a crawler’s pages not found (404s) exceed” to a less strict amount. What is it set to currently?

    The file “apple-touch-icon.png” (and a few similar files) are automatically loaded by Apple products, even if your site does not have them. Unfortunately, they sometimes try multiple times per visit, which can lead to a lot of 404 errors.

    You might also check that your IP address matches the number in the log message above. (You can google “my ip” to see your public IP address, if you are not sure where to find it.) If it doesn’t match, let us know here.

    Thread Starter Zabaan

    (@zabaan)

    Thanks for your helpful reply!

    It was indeed my IP address that caused the 404 errors.

    So I’m assuming it was because I was using Safari at the time that these got generated or would they get generated if you’re using any browser on an Apple computer? I wonder how Apple benefits from this?

    I now have that option (i.e. If a crawler’s pages not found (404s) exceed) set to 120 per minute it will get blocked. It was set to 30 before.

    Plugin Author WFMattR

    (@wfmattr)

    Ok, great! I think it only Safari, but I don’t know for sure if other browsers do the same on Macs, iPhones, or iPads.

    Apple uses these for the site’s icons, in bookmarks, desktop icons, etc. — if you have a logo or photo to use, you can create a file with that name (and a few others) to stop the 404s. (You can search for “apple-touch-icon.png” to find sites that explain the various sizes and options you should include.)

    Thread Starter Zabaan

    (@zabaan)

    Thank you, I’ll try implementing this fix now!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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