I had the same problem via CDN. I disabled the CDN and logged into the website and discovered that my country was listed on the block list! I think it must happened after the last update (I did not put my country on that list I swear!).
So you can solve this by login via FTP and in uploads find the iqblockcountry.ini. Download it, then edit, remove your country code, save and upload it back. And then should be fine (right?).
As I said I discovered long time ago that this plugin doesn’t really work but I wasn’t 100% sure. Now I am!
However, a free CDN account (CloudFlare, Incapsula, etc) supports country blocking so this means that it’s way better than using the plugin because the block occurs before your website gets hit (you avoid all that traffic).
Ditch the plugin and get a free CDN!
Plugin Author
Pascal
(@iqpascal)
In the current version there is a bug that resets some of the values to the default values if you either upgrade or reactivate the plugin.
Blocking all countries from the backend is one of the default values. This behavior is fixed in the current beta version.
You can disable blocking via the database. If you need help please let me know.
Cloudflare isn’t the same as IQ Block Country.
Cloudflare said:
Here are the steps you’ll want to take.
1. Scroll down to Add custom rule.
2. Start typing in the country name and then select the country.
3. Click on the “Block” button.
Notes:
CloudFlare’s country block currently only serves up a challenge page to visitors from the countries you decide to block. A human visitor could still enter your site from that country by passing the challenge page, so a country block is not a full block. If you fully want to block visitors from that country, then you would have to put rules on your server to block the country fully.
A future version of CloudFlare’s Threat Control will likely allow for a full block.
In IQ Block Country, I would love to be able to block all countries except the ones I choose not to. This would be a lot easier for many people. For me, I would block everything except the US.
Pascal, it’s not a very “global” way of thinking but it would be nice if your frontend had an option to quickly include _all_ countries, then we could select the ones we did not want to block. Like you do on the backend only an option rather than a default.
Unfortunately, the reality of the world is that for many of us running websites, the web traffic we get from some countries, Ukraine for example, is nearly all criminal. For many of us, unless we have a good reason to not block a country, might as well block most of them. The situation has become ridiculous, blocking countries is an essential part of self defense. MTN
Plugin Author
Pascal
(@iqpascal)
Unfortunately the code I use does not support a select all / deselect all function just yet 🙁
For now the quickest way to select all countries is by pressing CTRL and use the down array and enter key.
Plugin Author
Pascal
(@iqpascal)
And of course if you have default settings and you maintain multiple sites you can use the export / import function to easily import the same settings on the other sites.
It happened again. I got a blank page for the WP login and it said something about redirecting. Hostgator (the other hosting company was site5) said The problem here was due to the iq-block-country plugin installed and enabled on the WordPress site. They disabled it and I was able to log in. I reinstalled and it’s working again.
Same problem.
A detailed guide for deactivating the plug-in thru FTP without skipping “obvious” stebs would be greatly appriciated.
