i deleted wordfence-waf.php and

The “waf” file is there because WordFence put it there when you had it installed. It also creates a file “user.ini”, which its contents says to go to the “wordfence-waf” file.

So long as the “ini” file points to the “wordfence-waf” file, it will cause issues.

When someone tries to access your website, the “user.ini” file causes them to be filtered through “wordfence-waf”, which I suppose is the method of a firewall.

WordPress itself does not create a “user.ini” file, so I suppose this is strictly a WordFence creation.

Do the following,
:Use FTP
: access the root folder of your website
: rename user.ini to something like “user.CLOSED” (take out the “ini” extension) and save.
: retry your website and see if all returns to normal.
: if your site returns to normal, delete that “ini” file.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by mwarbinek.

thanks! i appreciate the help

Hi @cloudduster

That’s right, this is the file needed to load the firewall and if you opened it with any text editor you will see this comment line:

// Before removing this file, please verify the PHP ini setting "auto_prepend_file" does not point to this.

As a reference, you can check this guide to learn more about how to remove the firewall optimization manually.

Thanks.

thanks for the reply.

i’m curious. if you can change the “ini” file during installation, why can’t you just revert it during uninstall?

Hi @cloudduster

Normally, we can. However, sometimes due to file permissions issue -most probably- the uninstallation process doesn’t work as it should. It could be a script ran by your web host after the firewall optimization that changed some permissions or any other thing.

Thanks.