Hi jsghls!
It appears that wordpress.com hosting no longer allows Wordfence (and presumably some other security related plugins). I don’t know their reasoning behind that, so you are going to have to reach out to them for assistance.
Thanks!
Thread Starter
jsghls
(@jsghls)
Hi there! Thank you so much for your response. Does this mean every single WordPress website out there that has Wordfence is no longer able to use it?
Wouldn’t this affect nearly everyone who’s posting in this forum right now? Or is there a reason this would only affect some users and not other WordPress users?
There are two kinds of WordPress web sites. Those hosted on WordPress.com’s servers (like your site) and those hosted elsewhere. Only web sites hosted on the WordPress.com servers are affected by the security plugin restriction you noted. All WordPress web sites hosted elsewhere don’t have this restriction.
Hope this clarifies the situation!
Yep, just like rtcbad said it only applies to sites hosted with WordPress.com. WordPress.com is a company that hosts WordPress websites in a specific way. But you can host WordPress websites on any hosting provider and you will then be able to use Wordfence.
Thanks for the help rtcbad!
Thread Starter
jsghls
(@jsghls)
Ah, I see — thank you both so much! That really helps. Should I just be looking for another security plugin then?
I really liked Wordfence for what it’s worth =/
Hi jsghls!
By the looks of it there are several security related plugins that they don’t allow so you may not have better luck with another one. I would recommend you reach out to your host for advice in what plugins you can use. Alternatively, you could move your site to a different host.
Best of luck for now!
Hi, @wfasa, I have a similar issue. We just migrated a client site from WordPress.com to our servers. Everything was good, BUT, it won’t let us activate Wordfence and says it’s “not supported”.
What am I missing here? It’s a wordpress.org site now being hosted on a private server.
Hi ejschenck,
I’m not sure. Did you bring any MU plugins over by accident or is the site still running via wordpress.org somehow? Since the message is coming from them, it may be best to ask them about it. Of course would love if you share the reason here if you find anything out since it may benefit others in the same situation.
@wfasa “MU plugins?”
They’re not being very helpful at all since the customer is leaving them and coming to us.
The only way I’ve been able to get Akismet and Jetpack uninstalled (both of them say they are “managed automatically by wordpress”) was to have Plesk (our server software) literally just delete the plugins. They can’t be removed from the WP Instance’s Admin panel.
One weird thing is that Plesk is noticing a “blank” plugin that it can’t delete and I get this error message:
Warning: The ‘wpcomsh-loader’ plugin could not be found. No plugins updated. {“err_code”:true,”err_message”:”No plugins updated.”}
wpcom? wordpress.com? So it seems something is still jammed up in there that makes it think we are on wordpress.com yet.
MU plugins are “Must Use” plugins. They are located here: /wp-content/mu-plugins/. Check there and see if you find our wpcomsh loader. If you find it, I’d be happy to have a look at it to see if it is what’s disabling Wordfence. If so, zip it up and send to asa@wordfence.com and I’ll report back here as soon as I can (though I would also recommend removing it of course).
Oh yeah in case it’s not a MU plugin, you could start looking for a drop in plugin. It may be easier to just replace all the core files though tbh. Can find info about dropins here: https://hakre.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/must-use-and-drop-ins-plugins/
It was indeed in the “mu” directory and I will send it over for you to take a gander at. Upon deleting it everything was fine.
Thanks @ejschenck!
Had a quick look at this now. Not much to say other than that yes, it prevents Wordfence from running. The only other security plugin that seems to be blocked is better-wp-security (aka iThemes Security).
Thanks for tracking this down @ejschenck and sharing your solution in the forum.
Have a great rest of the week.
