Manaully Removed WordFence and Can’t Login to Dashboard

  • Please help as I’m losing my mind trying to totally remove WordFence from a site after moving to new domain. I have tried everything I’ve read and still receiving 500 error when trying to access login screen. Server error logs show it’s still looking for old path to wordfence-waf file.

    • I removed/deleted Wordfence plugin folder
    • I checked .htaccess, user.ini and php.ini and no references to waf file are there anymore.
    • I removed all wf database tables in phpMyAdmin
    • I emptied any cache on server and check using an incognito window to not use browser cache, etc
    • Where else would this path to the wordfence-waf file be? Is it hard coded somewhere else?? How can I remove all references from ever having the Wordfence plugin installed???

    PLEASE HELP as I have spent a few days trying different tactics with no success.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter claghorndesigns

    (@claghorndesigns)

    I took out reference to old host path below with “…” but this is the error in the new host server logs

    [16-Oct-2023 18:44:22 UTC] PHP Warning: Unknown: Failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 [16-Oct-2023 18:44:22 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Failed opening required ‘/…/…/public_html/wordfence-waf.php’ (include_path=’.:/opt/cpanel/ea-php80/root/usr/share/pear’) in Unknown on line 0

    Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @claghorndesigns, sorry to see you’ve had problems when removing Wordfence.

    The PHP Warning you’re getting does seem to suggest the auto_prepend_file is trying to load wordfence-waf.php still from somewhere. You can normally find this in your php.ini, .htaccess in the root of your site, or a .user.ini file (also often in the root of your site), so check any files with these names (even in other folders) if you haven’t already for the presence of this line.

    The instructions for removal using the Wordfence Assistant plugin, or entirely manually (including database table names to look out for) are here for your convenience just in case any steps were missed: https://www.wordfence.com/help/advanced/remove-or-reset/

    Thanks,
    Peter.

    Thread Starter claghorndesigns

    (@claghorndesigns)

    Hi @wfpeter, thanks for the quick response. Just so I’m clear before I go diving through the folders/files, the error would be coming from a file (.htaccess, user.ini, php.ini) not from the database? The sites I must move to the upgraded web servers have had WordFence running on them for up to 8 years and I privately host them. Thanks for any insight!

    Thread Starter claghorndesigns

    (@claghorndesigns)

    I GOT IT!!!! There was a php.ini file within the wp-admin folder that still had the append command to the old wordfence-waf.php file. I deleted it and I can access the backend of the site again. I removed the reference in the php.ini, .htaccess and the user.ini within the root folder but it was till getting referenced within the wp-admin folder’s php.ini file. I hope this helps someone else as this has cost me about 3 days of going insane. Thanks @wfpeter for your help.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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