Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Wordfence.
I see you opened a support post around 11pm est and then 7 minutes later left a negative review. While I am sure that your issue is important to you I’d remind you that support in the WordPress.org forums is voluntary and not offered 24/7/365 days a year. We do our best to answer everyone’s questions and have paid and trained staff here to help, but it is not reasonable to expect instant support in the middle of the night for a free plugin. Please be patient for any plugin support on WordPress.org and allow a plugin team or other community member time to help. I do see that Pete answered you about 2 hours ago (around 3 hours before our posted business hours!) and pointed you to the instructions on how to remove the plugin in our online documentation.
Getting to the crux of the issue, that site visitors are being blocked, Wordfence default settings are pretty lenient. For example, the default brute force settings allow 20 attempts at logging in before an IP is blocked. That’s so that when you install the plugin it won’t immediately block you if there is a problem. If those settings were changed from the defaults they were changed by either you or your dev from Fiverr. If a dev installs something on the site you should definitely ask them to walk you through how to use it before signing off that the work is done.
One last thing I thought I would mention. There are some good developers on Fiverr but there are also a lot of developers there that are less than reputable. These developers will sometimes offer to install a Premium version of a plugin like Wordfence for an additional cost and often at a cost that is less than the License cost on Wordfence.com (currently $119 per license per year). This is what is often referred to as a ‘nulled’ plugin. Not only will these plugins not work correctly (because they can’t validate with our servers to get scan signatures and firewall rules) but often they contain malicious code that allows hackers to compromise the site. This may not be the case for you but I wanted to make sure and warn you just in case it was, as well as mention it in case anyone else found this review in a Google search.
Please follow the steps in the link Pete sent you and, if you choose to reinstall Wordfence, make sure and check the documentation before you change any settings that you don’t understand. If however, you choose to go with another security provider, we wish you well in your experience there.
Mia
Mia… the obvious one star reviews are for an app that is not easy to remove in the first place. You might want to look at the reviews for this app…..So many one stars. I did not ask the person from Firverr to add this app! If I had known what he had done I would have had him remove it. You dont know what you dont know. Please!!!
Maybe you should have got to the crux of the issue rather than use this forum to correct a reviewer. Who is your boss? Maybe you should show them how you spoke to me. Unbelievable! Now I really know I left the correct review! Is this how they trained you?
Hi I’m the Founder and CEO of Wordfence. We care deeply about all of our customers, both free and paid, which is why Mia send you such a detailed response above with additional information about things like nulled plugins and links to our documentation. It sounds like you’re ready to move on. Sorry it didn’t work out. We have over 4 million customers who absolutely love Wordfence, and if you do decide to try Wordfence again we’d love to help you.
Kind regards,
Mark Maunder.
I wouldn’t call 231 1 star reviews out of 3,530 5 star reviews over almost 11 years an issue. These are all read by our staff and we try to make changes where appropriate so others don’t have the same experience the 1 star reviewer had. In your case the removal process is well documented. When you deactivate the plugin it even asks if you would like to remove everything so it knows what to keep (if you just want to reinstall but keep all the settings, for example). We did respond to you and will continue to do so in the support forums. Hopefully you’ll follow Peter’s instructions in your forum post and be able to solve your issue.
Mia
@redemptionshield While your frustration is quite understandable, we ask you please remember to treat your fellow humans with the respect and kindness you yourself would appreciate. Demanding to speak to someone’s boss is inappropriate here, as these forums are for the free support of the free version. Since you seem to have access to a support ticket on their system, we recommend you use that method should you wish to escalate your complaint, but you must keep that conversation off of WordPress.org for (among other things) YOUR legal protection.
We have set your account to ‘moderated’ for the time being to ensure you do not accidentally harm yourself.
This very much seems like the person from fiverr you hired acted on their own, and did not properly configure the plugin, nor did they take any time to help you learn how to use. We are very sorry you had this experience 🙁 But that is not the fault of the plugin itself.
WordFence _can_ be difficult to remove, but that is directly related to the complexity of it’s features (it’s a quirk in nearly all plugins that require editing of your PHP ini/settings). Thankfully WordFence has documented this process: https://www.wordfence.com/help/advanced/remove-or-reset/
