Used an invalid username ### to try to sign in (but it is valid)

  • I have a user who is on a trip to Mexico and can not login. I can login for him from the US without any difficulty. I am not using country blocking. Here is the error message: Used an invalid username “###” to try to sign in. The ### I added to cover up the real username. The username is correct and is in the list of users. This is especially odd since I have other users in Mexico who are not having this problem. Also, I checked the Live Traffic when the user is just browsing the website and he is not blocked from viewing. What can I do to let this user login?

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  • Hello, I’ve had similar problems over the last few years. It seems that sometimes a user will enter user name and Wordfence does not interpret the characters correctly, depending on something happening with the user’s input method. For example, in one of our cases the user was inputing from password management software that entered the user name. It would fail, but when he entered the user name manually it worked. We tried it over and over again, being very careful about what the password software had as a user name. It appeared perfect, but kept triggering the Wordfence block. It was frustrating. In your case, I’d suggest first determining if the user has changed their input method, perhaps a different keyboard, or a password manager. If the solution isn’t obvious, don’t waste time, create another user account with a different user name and have them try that.

    There is also the possibility that Wordfence doesn’t like the IP your user is coming from, but that would usually trigger a full block before they even got to the login screen, so it’s probably not the case. But something to consider.

    Hi @ralbeck,
    If you can log in with the same username, the only reasonable explanation is that the person is either typing their username wrong, or using some browser plugin to automatically fill in the username (which fills it out wrong).

    I understand that you can see in Live Traffic that they are not blocked when browsing. Have you also checked Live Traffic for when they try to log in? If so, you should be able to see if they’re using the wrong username in the blocked login entry in Live Traffic.

    Somehow, the illogical happened to us and a user, entering their user name from password manager, kept getting blocked. Even though they very carefully made sure the user name was correct in the password managers. I spent hours troubleshooting, never did figure out the why but did narrow it down to what exactly was happening. Super frustrating. It did trigger a Wordfence block so I attribute it to Wordfence. We tried it without Wordfence and it functioned correctly. Yeah, not logical, odd, but real. MTN

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