WP-Spamshield forbidding admin-ajax.php

Hi @terryg-1,

Please see the sticky post at the top of the forum: PLEASE READ BEFORE POSTING – Updated Jan 2017. (Or click on the support links on the plugin’s settings page.)

If you follow those steps, we’ll be able to help you out. ??

– Scott

I had read that page, and the “Troubleshooting Guide”, “FAQa”, and “Known Issues and Plugin Conflicts” before posting here.

I posted here (as stated in #1) so that people could find and be made aware of this issue with admin-ajax.php being Forbidden (403) and have a, at least temporary but workable, solution.

If you don’t want to address the issue here, that’s fine.

Thanks for the response.

I posted here (as stated in #1) so that people could find and be made aware of this issue with admin-ajax.php being Forbidden (403) and have a, at least temporary but workable, solution.

Unfortunately that doesn’t help us fix the issue. ??

We do want to address the issue, but the forums don’t provide the appropriate resources to solve the issues. Unfortunately, if users don’t want to follow our support process, there is nothing we can do to help.

Our process is tried and true, and extremely effective, which is why we have such positive feedback and reviews about our support. Our system is setup like it is for many good reasons. When issues are reported to us, we solve them within a day. But it requires back and forth conversation, interaction, and testing/debugging, which simply isn’t possible here.

I know you feel that you are helping make people aware of the issue, but all that does is actually prolong the issues instead of allowing us to fix it. It’s actually counterproductive. We strive for perfection, and in our perspective, we’d rather have zero issues for our users. We solve issues…that’s what we do. We need users to work with us though for that to happen.

fixed by reverting to v1.9.9.3

• This reply was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by Dan Claudiu G..

Hi @dcgavril,

PS: forcing people to move the support questions to your site is not the best solution, because it’s not an open forum. – but that’s just my opinion.

To be clear, we’re not forcing anyone to do anything. What we are doing is offering top notch tech support — for free.

Plugin developers are not obligated in any way to provide support for plugins — whether in the WordPress directory, or anywhere else. Yes, we choose to provide top notch tech support, for free.

The forums are provided for developers that don’t have a better support solution or system. We do have a better system.

For example, we have all the documentation on our site, and it can be translated into many languages. That can’t happen here.

We have troubleshooting guide and FAQs on our site, but not here. Those alone solve over 90% of people’s issues.

It’s an inaccurate assumption to think that the issue affecting you is affecting everyone. In most cases it’s not a general issue, but rather a conflict specific to the site or plugins. In those cases, we need debug feedback from the user, and we need to have a back and forth conversations. For security, this can’t be done by forum.

That’s why all the tech support links in our plugins point to our site, not here.

An open forum is nice, but it’s not efficient for tech support. It’s also not secure. It’s great for discussing political issues or news, or for voicing consumer complaints that have not been resolved for a long time. We’re not about that. We’re about solving problems. We’d rather our users just have zero issues.

When users contact us through the plugin’s actual support channel, we can fix issues within a day. That’s simply not possible through the forums either. So, please ask yourself, would you like the issue fixed, or would you like to prolong the issue not being fixed?

You end up helping all the other plugin users if you follow our support process, because it allows us to diagnose and fix issues quickly, and all the other plugin users can benefit from this. By extension, it ends up hurting all the other plugin users by not following our support process because it prolongs issues getting diagnosed and fixed. It really is that simple.

Also, please keep in mind that there are almost 200,000 users of the plugin, and we have over a quarter million plugin users for all of our plugins. We provide free support for all of these. There are far more of you all, than there are of us. We need the plugin users to take a few minutes to do some self-diagnosis first, otherwise free support simply is not possible.

We’re one of the most experienced WordPress development and support teams out there, and we’re known for our expertise in these matters. We’ve done tech support on literally tens of thousands of WordPress sites over more than a decade. This isn’t our first rodeo…we know what we speak of. ??

Thanks for understanding. ??

– Scott

Issue fixed – rollback to v1.9.9.3

No point in continuing a discussion if you are trying to lecture me on how good your dev team is.

Developing open source is easy, supporting it, is the real pain.

I appreciate your work and want to thank you again.

Have a great day.

No point in continuing a discussion if you are trying to lecture me on how good your dev team is.

We’re not trying to lecture anyone. Just providing some background, and asking you to be considerate. Open source requires everyone to pitch in…not just the developers. It doesn’t work unless everyone participates. You said that we’re “forcing” people into something that we’re not. That was an unfair statement…am I not allowed to respond to that and clarify?

Developing open source is easy, supporting it, is the real pain.

I would definitely not agree about developing open source being easy. Both aspects require a lot of work. We consider support as part of development. Each improvement is part of striving for perfection.

I appreciate your work and want to thank you again.

You’re very welcome. ?? You have a good day as well.

Real open source development is a lot easier than closed source or “open source” by 2-3 devs, because people collaborate and manage to find solutions faster to existing problems.

The WordPress development environment (and I’m referring just to themes+plugins) is open source only “by law” – forced by the WordPress main license, and that’s it, as you have stated very well in your previous post, your team (business wise) is very skilled and your product is high quality, but there’s no mention of collaboration with the rest of the open source wordpress devs and users out there, even if each support question has help you develop this plugin, we all pitched in.

The www.remarpro.com was meant for open source development, but it failed to provide the same tools and features as GitHub or GitLab, in order to be easy to collaborate and share knowledge. In our days, this repository is used just to get contact details for consulting gigs (see we don’t respond here, go there and fill out the form, and “We’re one of the most experienced WordPress development and support teams out there, and we’re known for our expertise in these matters.”) or to sell “pro” version of a open source plugin. “Open source requires everyone to pitch in…not just the developers. It doesn’t work unless everyone participates.” – I definitely wanted to pitch in (already did by stating an issue between versions and losing a lot of time debugging the causes of a site functionality crash – so did @terryg-1 ), but there’s no point in doing so, if your reaction is like that, we all have companies or do dev/consulting or whatever, but we try keep a fruitful collaboration while developing open source solutions.

Just to give you an example or two of forums for open source apps support and dev that work perfectly for their job > meta.discourse.org … xda-developers, not to mention Stackoverflow with the dedicated tags and a lot more forums like those that don’t have any problems in showing publicly that there’s an issue with a release, that it, nobody was throwing rocks at you. If we didn’t cared about your work, we wouldn’t be here posting something here – we could have be giving a bad rating without an explanation like others do.

You can close the thread, or even remove it altogether, because it’s not actually useful for the rest.

Thank you again for your dev and help. Good luck.

@dcgavri,

BTW I agree about Stackoverflow and xda-developers.

The www.remarpro.com was meant for open source development, but it failed to provide the same tools and features as GitHub or GitLab, in order to be easy to collaborate and share knowledge.

This is not really a “forum” at all, or maybe a “low-functioning forum”. For example there is no way to PM anyone. That is essential. Not really worried about anyone throwing rocks. ?? Security is an area of primary focus for us, and forums just aren’t a great way to transmit diagnostic data, logs etc.

I definitely wanted to pitch in (already did by stating an issue between versions and losing a lot of time debugging the causes of a site functionality crash – so did @terryg-1 ), but there’s no point in doing so, if your reaction is like that, we all have companies or do dev/consulting or whatever, but we try keep a fruitful collaboration while developing open source solutions.

I’m not sure why you would say that. It seems to me that is an unfounded negative reaction. We love our plugin users, and bend over backwards to help. There is absolutely no reason to spend a lot of time debugging…just let us know you need help, we get some diagnostic data and email back and forth, and boom, we fix it in no time. No reason to argue or be unhappy. ?? I’m not sure why that would be so objectionable. Meanwhile other people ARE pitching in, and helping solve the issue…for all users. It took them less time than it took you to write these responses. ??

Real open source development is a lot easier than closed source or “open source” by 2-3 devs, because people collaborate and manage to find solutions faster to existing problems.

In general, I completely agree…I just don’t think that applies here. That applies more to creating solutions for specific coding applications, but not so much for tech support, and/or diagnosing specific bugs. We already have diagnostic tools in place. If plugin users submit logs, rule out common issues first, we can usually fix the bug in minutes.

I do appreciate your input though. ??

Just a follow up to anyone reading this thread:

Thanks to a couple plugin users who reported a similar issue through the plugin’s support page, we were able to locate the issue, and create a fix. Version 1.9.9.9.5 has been released, and will take care of the issue.

I’m going to mark this thread as resolved, but if anyone has any further issues, please submit a support request at the WP-SpamShield Support Page, and we will be happy to help you out.

– Scott

That was quite fast, Scott.

Unfortunately that doesn’t help us fix the issue.

I disagree. Not only did it let you (and others) know that a specific issue existed, I had also spent time isolating the culprit so you could know where to start looking if you cared and needed to. And, it certainly did not prevent you from doing so.

Given that we, as users, sometimes experience slow and inadequate support, I had also determined and provided a workable solution for those needing one while we all waited for who knows how long. (Please allow me to suggest that you mention your bug-fix response time in your “PLEASE READ BEFORE POSTING” post.)

My question in #3 raised the issue of whether this was intended behavior or a potential bug — which you did not address. (Why should one request support for intended behavior?)

What I actually expected was a simple clarification from you such as:
1. That’s intended behavior, you need to ‘Disable anti-spam for miscellaneous forms’; or
2. That’s a problem caused by the other plugins, you need to contact them; or
3. That’s likely a bug that we need to address. Please provide more information through our official support channel.

If the response had been like #3, I would have gladly done so. But, not knowing the true nature of the issue (and your response time), I provided a clue for you, and workable knowledge for the rest of us.

Thank you for the plugin, your time, and your impressively fast response. ??

Hi Gone Fishin,

It’s definitely not an intended behavior. WP-SpamShield would not want to block AJAX functionality. We never want to interfere with other plugin functionality. The goal is to run quietly in the background without interfering with any other site functionality or user experience.

AJAX makes POST requests exactly like a form does. It’s likely either #2 or #3 — in either case we’d need to get more info from you through the official support channel. If the plugin does not identify itself properly as an AJAX request (by adding an X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest header), it might be #2, but we’d have to test and see. There are possibilities for whitelisting in individual cases, but if plugins are using well-coded AJAX, it usually isn’t necessary.

So yes, if you want to follow up with a support request, we can likely get the exact issue/conflict figured out quickly.

Thank you for the plugin, your time, and your impressively fast response. ??

You’re very welcome! We want all of our plugin users to have a flawless experience. When an issue gets discovered, we strive to get a patch released within 24 hours or less.

– Scott

Nice informative response.

But, there’s no need for any further follow-up. Everything’s good now ??

When an issue gets discovered, we strive to get a patch released within 24 hours or less.

And it appears you do well with that.