Manually Blocked IP Addresses Not Staying Blocked

Hi @mance-creative, thanks for getting in touch.

What method are you trying to permanently block the IPs? It does sound unusual to become unblocked immediately, as even hitting the “BLOCK IP” button from your Live Traffic should block for a minimum of the time set under Wordfence > All Options > Rate Limiting Rules > How long is an IP address blocked when it breaks a rule.

You can increase the above value to hours or even days to try stemming the flow of retries if you’re noticing a lot of activity from certain IPs rather than taking manual action for each one, especially as it takes extra time to manage a manual block list and keep on top of IPs that may eventually get reassigned to legitimate visitors.

During the timescale specified in the above setting, they’ll appear on the list in the Wordfence > Blocking page. It is possible to click the “Make Permanent” button here after checking the box next to one or more IPs. You can also make manually typed permanent IP blocks on this page, if you’d like to see if that works after copying one of the IPs you wish to block from Live Traffic.

It’s important to note that Wordfence does all of the important blocking automatically so you don’t have to. Wordfence considers intent of an IP’s request to your site when blocking, so simply increasing the time they’re blocked before they can retry might be the best deterrent.

Thanks,
Peter.

Thank you for the explanation. I actually use the permanent block feature a lot on our other websites, but this is the first time I have experienced it not working correctly.

I did notice though when trying to export a backed-up database on the website, that the export failed once it’s got to the “wfblocks7” database table. So it appears perhaps that that Wordfence table is corrupted perhaps and may be causing the issue? Let me know if that makes sense.

If that could be the cause, is there a way to repair that database table?

Thanks!
Mitch

Thanks @mance-creative,

The wp_wfBlocks7 table does indeed store currently blocked IPs for your site, but it’s not totally unheard of for certain tables to require repairing. You can repair tables in phpmyadmin if you have that option available to you. Otherwise, you may need to look up the best way to repair using the tools you have.

Thanks again,
Peter.

Thank you! I actually just uninstalled and reinstalled the plugin and it fixed the corrupted DB table. So all good now.

Mitch

Perfect, that’s great news @mance-creative. If you have further Wordfence questions in future by all means start up a new topic and we’ll always be happy to help out.

Peter.