Fatal error?

I saw similar posts on this topic but all indicated they tried to remove wordfence. I’ve done no such thing and now my site is down.

So I followed the other threads and deleted all lines in htaccess and ini that were related to wordfence. That seemed to do the trick.

However – I would still like to know why this problem happens when I’ve made no changes to my firewall nor attempted to delete wordfence from my site (as appears to be the case for others in this forum).

This is also the 2nd time this has happened to my site. Please advise.

Hi pttony,
Somehow the wordfence-waf.php file has been removed from your file system. I’m afraid it’s not possible for me to say how that happened. We do not remove it unless you have Wordfence set to “Delete Wordfence tables and data on deactivation” and then deactivate Wordfence. If you have not removed wordfence-waf.php and you have not moved your site (moving can cause file paths to change) you may want to get in touch with your web host and ask them about it. Files do not disappear by themselves so it has been removed either by manual removal or possibly by some software your web host has installed on the server.

from all the forum posts I’ve been reading it seems several people have this issue related to the WF firewall. It’s odd that it could be a web host issue as I run three other sites on the same account with WF and none have had this issue. Could there be some compatibility issues with themes or other plugins that could cause this?

The wordfence-waf.php was definitely not removed from my system. My work around – as seems to be the case with those who try to delete WF – was to delete any wf lines in my htaccess and ini files. After that I could get back into WP and reset the firewall.

Again – the files did not disappear.

Hi pttony,

In most cases we see like this the wordfence-waf.php file has been deleted. If the file exists then it is going to be a server configuration or permissions issue. It could be some issue with symlinks for example. We test the plugin on a large set of different server setups before every release. However, we do not have access to your hosting environment so if something on it is causing this unwanted behavior, your web host would be in the best position to answer why it happens.

If it is only happening on one of the sites even though you have several sites installed on the same hosting account, then there would be some difference in how that site works in comparison to the others. I can’t think of a way another plugin could cause this.