It locked me out of my admin panel

Hi @truden,

I completely understand your frustration. Getting locked out of your own website is a stressful experience, and I am sorry you had to deal with that.

Advanced IP Blocker is an “Enterprise-Grade” firewall, which means it strictly enforces the rules you set. The most common cause of a self-lockout is enabling the “Whitelist Login Access” feature (which restricts the login page to specific IPs) while having a dynamic IP address, or accidentally blocking your own country in the Geoblocking settings.

Because these features are extremely powerful, we include bright red WARNING messages in the plugin settings specifically advising users to whitelist their own IP and server IP before enabling strict login restrictions.

How to get your access back in 2 minutes:
You are not permanently locked out. You can easily regain access via FTP or your hosting control panel:

1. Navigate to /wp-content/plugins/ using FTP or File Manager.
2. Rename the folder advanced-ip-blocker to advanced-ip-blocker-disabled.
3. You can now log into your WordPress admin panel normally.

Once inside, you can reactivate the plugin, ensure your IP is added to the Whitelist in the Dashboard, and disable the strict login rule. We even have a dedicated guide for this exact scenario: How to Unblock Yourself.

I would love for you to give the plugin another chance with the correct whitelist settings in place, as it truly is a powerful shield against bots. If you need any help setting it up safely, please reach out in the support forum!

Best regards.

Hi @truden,

Thank you for replying and clarifying that!

That piece of information (“locked out immediately on plugin activation”) changes everything. A fresh installation should never lock you out immediately, as all strict blocking features (like Country Blocking or Login Restriction) are disabled by default, and the Setup Wizard actively attempts to whitelist your IP.

As the developer, I want to investigate this immediately to ensure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. If you are willing to share a few technical details, it would be incredibly helpful for debugging:

1. What kind of block did you see? Did you see a white screen with our plugin’s logo and “Access Restricted” message? Or was it a generic server error (like a 500 Internal Server Error or a blank white screen)?
2. Environment: Are you using Cloudflare or any other reverse proxy/CDN?
3. Previous Installation: Was this a brand new installation from the WordPress repository (v8.8.9), or did you previously have an older version of the plugin installed and were re-activating it?
4. Other Security Plugins: Were there any other security or caching plugins active at the moment of activation?

I completely understand if you’ve moved on, but if you have a moment to answer any of those questions, it would give me exactly the clues I need to track down this edge-case bug.

Thank you again for your time and feedback!

Best regards,

@inilerm