Skimlink Hyper link text

Hi @norlyn, I’m well thank-you.

I took a look into Skimlinks expecting it to be a plugin, but from looking at their website, they provide a piece of JavaScript to insert into your site. There is a chance that Wordfence is seeing this script as malicious but there are a couple of things you can try.

If Wordfence is blocking the code, those events will be logged in?Live Traffic?at the time you tried to submit the form. If there is a block, check the red block reason after expanding the entry with the eye icon in the corner. You can filter Live Traffic by “Blocked” so it’s easier to find. You may find a specific firewall rule or Wordfence setting stated here after expanding the entry as the reason is shown in red text.

Live Traffic should present you with an “ADD PARAM TO FIREWALL ALLOWLIST” button when you expand a block line.

If you haven’t already tried enabling Learning Mode, you can read more about this and also the method of allowlisting directly from Live Traffic I described above here:?https://www.wordfence.com/help/firewall/learning-mode/

Many thanks,
Peter.

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your response.

The solution you have suggested above doesn’t work. To give you a more thorough explanation, here is a video of what happened to hyperlink texts. https://vimeo.com/1019300394/4aa5a3e648?share=copy

I hope you can help me.

Many thanks

Hi @norlyn, thanks for providing the extremely detailed video.

This doesn’t seem to tally with what I would expect if Wordfence was causing the links to disappear, but there are quite a lot of unknowns.

I haven’t seen the browser console from the pages when the links are blank, which might point to a reason why the Skimlinks JavaScript is unable to load, or at least show a 404 or other HTTP code reason for that. It would also be useful to see which blocks happened in Wordfence during the October 13/14 period to see if a firewall rule or other update triggered a script or page update to be blocked. If there’s nothing logged in that period, and no blocks to the script on the front-end, there’s a high likelihood Wordfence isn’t the cause.

Finally, do you have any other security plugins, or are you (or your host) running any other firewalls at the server-side that could be involved? We can discover some of that information and maybe use it to run some tests at our end if you send a diagnostic over. You can do this from?Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics?to us at?wftest @ wordfence . com. Click on?“Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and?respond here after you have sent it.

NOTE: It should look as follows – Screenshot of Tools > Diagnostic > Send by Email

Many thanks,
Peter.

Hi Peter. Thank you for your last message. I am about to send you the logs as you requested.

In the meantime, here is a very short video showing the the anchor text/links were removed again yesterday afternoon between 15:29 and 15:44 (Sunday, 28th October).

Hi Peter. I have sent across that Diagnostics report as requested.

In answer to your question regarding the plugins, I’m not aware we’re using any other security plugins. Here is a screenshot of all our plugins. Twelve of which are activated and three are not.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jjpj46ij720kpypra5m09/Screenshot-2024-10-28-at-8.52.54-AM.png?rlkey=jvra3q594agwo1lmg6t5ioej3&dl=0

Hi Peter. Did you get the Diagnostics report I sent over.

For the record, the texts we are testing disappeared again. Unfortunately a bug in the monitors we’re using can’t confirm the time or day but I suspect it was Sunday afternoon again. We’re going to re-insert the text to set up the experiment again to see if we can confirm this pattern of the text disappearing at the same time time each week.