Mark Maunder

Hi,

OK I understand. 🙂

Yes, you need to check the box to delete all wordfence data on deactivation at the bottom of your Wordfence options page. Then disable and reenable the plugin on each of the sites. That will cause it to fetch a new key.

Regards,

Mark.

They emailed us on the 23rd of April telling us they were going to do this and the reason why: “due to a large overlap in functionality, we are going to be adding Wordfence to our disallowed plugins list next week”. We did a quick audit and discovered they’re a tiny part of our free and paid customer base (less than 1%). So we didn’t even bother to publish anything.

Then they emailed their customers claiming problems with Wordfence – see above. Needless to say I won’t be buying drinks for their staff in future (as I have in the past).

You know what to do.

Regards,

Mark.

Done. We found 17 new files which are now marked safe in the first ZIP and 3 files in the second one.

Try again and let me know if that helped.

Regards,

Mark.

Please visit the following file in the source code of WP-Ban:

https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/wp-ban/trunk/wp-ban.php

Scroll down to line 181.

See where it calls gethostbyaddr()

That does a DNS lookup on EVERY visit to your site if the IP has not already been banned. It will slow your site down to a crawl and you won’t see an increase in CPU disk or memory usage and you’ll wonder why.

That is why we don’t block by hostname.

Instead we offer blocking by IP range and give you a way to look up the IP range of a particular hosting provider using the WHOIS function built into Wordfence and the integration lets you do this with a few clicks.

To find out more about how gethostbyaddr() slows down your site see the PHP documentation here:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.gethostbyaddr.php (do a search for the word ‘slow’ without quotes)

And here’s a google search:

https://www.google.com/search?q=gethostbyaddr+slow

Now do me a favor and go out and spread the word that gethostbyaddr() is VERY BAD™ and anyone using it on a production website should be tarred, feathered and woken up at 4am to the sound of The Scorpions “Rock you like a hurricane” blaring through cheap headphones.

Regards,

Mark.

Thanks for both of these reports. The undefined variable AND the ob_end_clean warning. Both of these issues have been fixed and will be included in the next release. The beta will be released Friday.

Regards,

Mark.

For this reason, it would be great is Wordfence enabled a feature whereby we could nominate the specific common hack usernames such as “admin” to permanently block.

This will be in the next release. But don’t take my word for it. My co-founder Kerry posted this about 20 minutes ago:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/large-number-of-failed-logins?replies=3#post-5545076

@davidbrugge My humble apologies sir. As an advocate for our product I’d like to assure you that we’re not resting on our laurels and are taking note of your feedback. There were some core features and fixes we needed to get into the product before we could get on to other feature requests and these caused a delay in us implementing this feature. I can assure you that it will be in the next release and the timeline for this is that we will be releasing a Beta on approximately Friday this week with the production version coming out the following Sunday or Monday depending on how many issues are reported by our Beta testers.

I’m a bit nervous about marking this resolved, but I’m going to go ahead and do that and please trust me that this will be in the next release.

Regards,

Mark.

Hi Gregoire,

They should be blocked from the login page even if you have Falcon enabled. Can you tell me how you know they’re able to access that page?

Regards,

Mark.