sign in problem

Hi @kengray20,

Thanks for reaching out. If you are an administrator on the site, the blocking page offers to send you an email to unlock your own access. On most modern hosts, these emails should arrive within seconds or minutes.

If your site is unable to send emails, or if it takes so long to arrive that the recovery link in the email has already expired when you receive it, you can temporarily deactivate Wordfence by doing the following:

• Please use FTP/SFTP — or any file manager your web host provides via their administration panel.
• Look inside the /wp-content/plugins/ directory and rename the wordfence directory to wordfence.bak.
• Once you have logged in to your WordPress admin you can name the folder back to wordfence again.
• Refresh your dashboard and you should be able to see Wordfence Active again. If not, go to the Plugins page and Activate it.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

Thanks,
Margaret

Margaret:

I had the hostgator representative on the line for 90 minutes trying to solve this.

It should have been a five-minute job.

What I eventually had to do was get Wordfence deactivated, I signed in. Then deleted Wordfence and all its data, the reloaded it.

That worked but it was a unnecessarily long process.

All I wanted to do was change the user name.

However Wordfence shut me out when I tried to do that.

Anyway, I’ve spent too much time on this. That said, it’s a great plugin.

I hope you can straighten that out.

cheers

kgray

Hi @kengray20,

Thanks for following up and I’m glad to hear you enjoy the plugin! Changing the username shouldn’t cause a lockout. If you’d like me to look into this more, can you provide the steps HostGator had you take to change the username? Were you running into issues such as the login failing that may have led to the lockout?

In the future, you can use the Wordfence Assistant plugin to remove the lockout without having to reset Wordfence’s data. First, you’ll deactivate Wordfence as outlined above. Once deactivated, you can use the Wordfence Assistant plugin to regain access.?

• Install the “Wordfence Assistant” plugin. You can find it by going to “Plugins” > “Add New”. Then search “wordfence assistant” without quotes. You can also obtain it from the official WordPress plugin repository.
• Activate the plugin.
• Go to the “WF Assistant” menu.
• Click the button to disable the Wordfence firewall.

Then you can rename the Wordfence directory back to the original name and you will not be locked out. Once Wordfence has been reactivated, disable or adjust the feature in Wordfence that locked you out. You can view details on the specific lockout reason in Tools > Live Traffic.

Thanks,
Margaret

Margaret:

Thank you for your concern and your diligence.

I’ve actually spent a great deal of time getting this straightened out … hours to be sure. And much time on the phone with hostgator.

So as much as I would like to help, I have a big website to run and dealing with these technical issues is time consuming.

If you can figure it out from your end so much the better … it is your plugin.

By deleting all the data and the plugin and then re-installing it, well that stopped the lockout and at this point that’s all I want. I just want the plugin to work and to create a good website that does 186,000 page views a week.

So as you can imagine, I’m busy.

Accordingly, I don’t want to spend any more time on it.

If you want to tweek it in some way that corrects this, that would be fine, but I’m moving on.

It’s a good plugin but that ate up a lot time and was quite frustrating. So I’ve had enough, thanks.

cheers

kgray

Hi @kengray20,

Thanks for following up! I completely understand if you don’t want to spend any more time on this and I appreciate your patience so far. Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns!

Thanks,
Margaret