sinapars

Hi Peter,

I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to follow up on the proxy support request I sent last month. I haven’t seen any updates on this yet, so I was wondering if there are any plans to include this feature in future versions of Wordfence.

I’d really appreciate any updates you can share. Thanks again for your time and support!

Best regards

@wfpeter

Hi @wfpeter

I’ve just sent the diagnostic information to the email address you provided. The email subject is “Suggestion for WP_HTTP_Proxy Support in Wordfence Plugin“. I’ve attached the requested file and also included an additional download link for your convenience, in case the attachment doesn’t work.

This feature is quite important for users like me who rely on WP HTTP Proxy configurations due to restricted direct internet access. I’ve been unable to manually update the WAF rules for over a year, which has been a significant challenge.

If there’s any additional information or steps you need from me to assist in adding this feature, please let me know. I’m happy to provide further details to help make this possible.

Thank you once again for your time and for considering this request. I hope with your help, this feature can be added to benefit others in similar environments as well.

Regards

Hi Nathanael,

Thank you so much for the update! It’s great to hear that the lead developer is planning to add this as an option in the plugin in the near future. I really appreciate the effort your team is putting into improving this feature, and I’ll definitely keep an eye on the changelog for the future release.

That said, I wanted to share a small concern regarding the implementation of this update. I hope this new feature will be introduced as an optional setting rather than a default, mandatory one. The reason for this is that while it’s incredibly useful for smaller datasets, it can lead to significant issues (like freezing or crashing) when working larger datasets after exporting, as we’ve discussed before.

Allowing users to enable or disable or check or uncheck this option when exporting based on their specific needs would provide maximum flexibility and avoid unintended complications for those working with large data files.

Thank you again for your support
@njones35

Thank you so much for your response and for sharing the developer’s feedback along with the documentation link. I’m genuinely happy to learn that this action was already anticipated and documented. I appreciate you bringing it to my attention—it’s incredibly helpful!

With this action available, there’s no need for a hard fix by users or your dev team, especially considering the potential freezing issue with larger files. That said before, the snippet can still be extremely effective for smaller files, and it’s great to have this option for those cases.

Unfortunately, I tested the provided snippet as well, and the issue with the file becoming unresponsive (or crashing) persists when working with larger datasets. This makes it difficult to work with the exported file in tools like Excel or Numbers or Google sheets.

Thank you again for all your support and for helping improve the experience with Formidable Forms. If your team happens to explore a more robust solution in the future, I’d be happy to assist with testing.

@njones35

Hi @njones35 ,

Thank you so much for your response and for forwarding my suggestion to the development team. I really appreciate the time and effort your team puts into improving Formidable Forms.

After further testing, I discovered that the issue with freezing isn’t limited to Excel. It also occurs in other software like Numbers and Google Sheets, especially when working with large datasets. Essentially, adding the BOM code makes it almost impossible to work with heavy data files.

Given that many users rely on Windows and Excel, I believe it would be better not to implement this change until a more robust solution is found, as it could negatively impact a significant portion of your user base.

For further clarification:
Your plugin generates CSV files with proper and correct UTF-8 encoding. For example, when opening the file in Notepad, all characters display correctly. However, if the file is opened directly in Excel, the characters appear distorted. To resolve this, users need to:

Go to the Data tab in Excel.
1. Select From Text/CSV.
2. Choose the downloaded CSV file.
3. Select file origin on Unicode (UTF-8) and load Button
4. This ensures everything displays correctly in Excel.

The code I shared earlier bypasses these steps and resolves the issue directly, but unfortunately, it introduces a more serious problem (software freezing), which can be incredibly frustrating.

For now, I believe it’s best not to make this change until a better solution is identified. If your team comes up with an alternative and needs it tested before implementing it as a hard fix, please feel free to reach out—I’d be happy to assist with testing.

Thank you again for your support!

Hi @jonathanenlared

Thank you for your response and for the efforts your team is putting into improving the import/export feature. I really appreciate it.

However, I believe there might have been some misunderstanding regarding the solution. The issue I encountered wasn’t resolved with the batch size adjustment. The solution that worked for me was increasing the timeout duration in the main web server configuration, which solved the issue.

In the meantime, I also found another solution by adding this line to the FrmCSVExportHelper.php file in the function public static function generate_csv( $atts ) at line 104:

set_time_limit(0);

With this code alone, there was no need for the batch size adjustment or changing the timeout in the main web server configuration, and it solved the issue. Additionally, it reduced the time required to prepare the file by around one minute.

Thanks again for your support! Please let me know if you need any further details.

BR
Sina

Update:

I recently discovered an issue with the provided fix when working with large CSV files in Excel specifically. When the file is downloaded and opened for editing in Excel, even small changes cause the software to freeze and stop responding until it’s restarted.

Interestingly, the file size itself doesn’t change, and this issue only occurs when working with Excel. Other software (like Numbers or Google Sheets) doesn’t seem to have this problem.

It seems this happens because the BOM is applied to all characters in the file.

I’m currently searching for an alternative solution to address this problem, but I’d be happy to hear any ideas or suggestions your developers might have to resolve it more efficiently.

Thank you!

Hi @moderator

I sent an email on Friday, January 3rd, as per your recommendation, but unfortunately, I haven’t received a response yet, and the post moderation restriction is still in place.

I would appreciate it if you could kindly follow up on this matter or let me know if there’s anything else I should do.
Thank you for your time and assistance!

Best regards,
Sina

Hi @jonathanenlared

Thank you so much for looking into this issue and providing the pre-release version. I tested it with different batch size values, such as 50, 100, 150, 200, and 300, but unfortunately, the problem still persists. To be honest, even if it had worked, I’m not sure how practical and reliable this solution would be in the long run, for a few reasons:

1. Server Variability:
   The resources available on each server differ significantly. As a result, the batch size values that should be selected will vary based on each user’s infrastructure and server conditions.
2. Dynamic Data Growth:
   The amount of data in each form changes over time. As users, we would need to constantly experiment with different batch sizes to achieve optimal performance. This trial-and-error approach isn’t feasible.

For now, I found a temporary solution to resolve the issue:
I increased the server timeout in the main web server configuration file located at:
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
by adding these two parameters:

Timeout 600
ProxyTimeout 600

However, this is not a recommended solution for several reasons:

• Only a small percentage of users have access to dedicated servers and can modify their web server configuration.
• From a security perspective, this is risky as it increases the likelihood of running heavy or malicious scripts.

Suggestions:
To address this issue more effectively, here are a few suggestions:

1. Database and Export Optimization:
   Optimizing the database structure and the way data is generated and exported. I replicated my form (with 30,000 records) in a competitor’s plugin, and to my surprise, the export process was completed on a shared server with limited resources (128MB RAM) in under 20 seconds.
2. Custom Date Range for Export Filters:
   Adding the ability to filter export data based on a custom date range (start and end date). While I understand the pro version includes some date-based options, they are very limited as they only allow filtering by day, month, or year. A more flexible calendar-based system where users can select a specific date range would be much more helpful.
3. Excel Export Option:
   Adding an option to export form data in Excel format. This would provide better accessibility, consume fewer server resources, and significantly reduce file size. For example:

• A CSV file with 30,000 entries takes up about 40MB.
• The same data exported in Excel format would only be about 4MB—almost 10 times smaller.

Additional Notes (FYI):

• While reviewing the code, it seems the batch size adjustment only applies to the export process. However, this issue also affects imports with large records.
• One of my clients, who has a large dataset, reported similar problems in the Entries tab and while downloading CSV files in the pro version.
• The issue also occurs when attaching a CSV file to emails during form submission.
• In the Reports tab, pages with large datasets fail to load and time out after a few minutes.

Thank you for your continued support, and I hope these suggestions help improve the plugin’s functionality for all users. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can assist with.

BR
Sina

thanks for response?@jonathanenlared?,
Sorry for the delay
My posts need to be approved but I don’t know why it’s not happening or it’s happening twice!

I enabled error logs but no errors are saved in the debug.log file and I don’t get any errors in the output either
But in the console as I mentioned before I get error 500 of which I sent you screenshots

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a87-bj9HJ1JIaim23jF8yixVJ0bNCP9Q/view
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HRahdllSl4ht2r77zNev-h79VC-mRZ5P/view

But what might help you is the error I am getting in the web server error logs:

[Thu Jan 02 20:00:17.636002 2025] [core:error] [pid 50254:tid 140668735305472] [client X.XX.X.XXX:48554] Script timed out before returning headers: admin-ajax.php, referer: https://XXXXX/XX/wp-admin/admin.php?page=formidable-import

BR

Hi @amitbarai013

I tested the dev-version and the problem is solved. Thanks for your great and constant support ??

I have already proudly rated your plugin and registered feedback, and I dare say that your team is one of the best WordPress plugin support teams. ??

BR

Hi @amitbarai013

I appreciate your feedback, and I’m glad to hear that installing the dev-version resolved the word counting issue.

BR

Hi again @amitbarai013
Thank you for the screencast and the information you shared with me

I understand that we can translate the strings using that plugin or other methods, but as I mentioned in the previous post, maybe we need to use another word in the same English language other than updated on, for example, the last update date of this article: ……
And the possibility of personalizing it can be efficient

I am glad that the addition of the author is in your list of updates, and I hope that it will be provided soon with the possibility of personalizing the word by ??
Updated on?October 1, 2024?by?John Doe

BR

• This reply was modified 11 months ago by sinapars.

Hi Again @zebaafiashama

I’m sorry for my late reply
All the previous problems have been solved, but a new problem has been detected, which may be worth checking by your technical team

Minimal impact on pagespeed:
https://wphive.com/plugins/betterdocs/

BR

Hi @sadmansakibnadvi

Your are wonderful
I’m really glad I can contribute to your plugin and share suggestions. I know it’s important to your team, and I appreciate your hard work.
Big thanks to you and your whole team for the amazing support!

BR