You have been banned from this site.

Glad to help.

The only time actual visitors can get blocked by this plugin, is when there is some sort of error or conflict happening. Usually that means page caching is involved. As explained in the plugin documentation, readme.txt, homepage, help tab, plugin settings, and elsewhere, Blackhole is not compatible with *page cache* plugins. Here is a post with more details.

Or, if it’s not a page cache plugin, then some other plugin (or maybe theme) is interfering with normal functionality. I am glad to help diagnose if this is the case.

And to answer your question directly, make sure that the plugin is working correctly, and normal visitors never will be blocked.

I hope this helps. Let me know if I can provide any further infos.

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for touching base. I was surprised that this was the case tbh. I’ve been running both a caching plugin, and BHFBB for over two years without any issues whatsoever. I did not expect this to happen after so much time.

Although now that I think of it over, previously I was on a Litespeed Web Server host with the LSCWP plugin for managing the caching, and now I have moved the site to a new host with Apache, and I have been using WP Super Cache according to the theme’s owners instructions (Newspaper). Perhaps that might be the culprit?

It shouldn’t be however. According to the link you shared both plugins should be compatible with each other. I had already configured the required cache settings as per the instructions for my case.

I also followed the instructions for checking that the plugin is working correctly (the one including opening the forbidden path via a VPN or a proxy) and it appears to work as expected. I am not on Pro, so I can’t mess with the Threshold option, but I did get the following in my source code:

<h1>You have fallen into a trap!</h1>
<p>
This site&rsquo;s <a href="/robots.txt">robots.txt</a> rules explicitly forbid your presence at this location.
Because you did not obey the robots.txt rules, further requests from your IP Address will be denied access.
If you feel this is a mistake, you can access the site via proxy service and contact the administrator.
</p>
<h2>Your Information</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>IP Address:</strong> 172.71.98.197</li>
<li><strong>Host Name:</strong> 172.71.98.197</li>
</ul>

What else is there to try?

Hi Konstatninos,

Basically figuring out the cause of the issue requires troubleshooting, basic trial and error. If it turns out not to be cache-related, then the next step is to test your other plugins. It can be a tedious process, but really the only way to find out what’s happening. If it might help, I would be glad to provide a troubleshooting guide and/or guide for testing Blackhole. Let me know how I can be of service.

Hi Jeff,

Thannks, I will go through the process of troubleshooting this manually next, and should I run into issues that would require your further assistance, I will let you know.

Cheers.

Understood. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. In the meantime, I’ll mark this as resolved to keep things tidy. Thank you Konstatninos.