Why not adding the most requested feature?

Hi @catsfoto1se, it’s always great to hear how valuable a feature would be for our customers.

We do have a development case open for adding custom block pages, and we always will use additional requests for the same thing to assist us in prioritizing new features. As a relatively small team, malware signatures, and features that contribute to protecting our customers’ sites in response to new threats or attack vectors will often take much of our attention. That’s why we won’t commit to specific features or timescales before a new version of the plugin is tested and ready for release.

Attackers will hit the block pages, but our customers are in control of their own blocks and therefore there will always be site visitors (or legitimate admins/users/customers) that get blocked, sometimes unintentionally. For this reason we might discourage a more strongly worded block page.

I’ll also add that the vast majority of attacks against WordPress sites are bots programmed to run tests to see if they can get in. They don’t really care why they get blocked or the contents of the HTTP response, they just automatically move on to the next site until they find one that is vulnerable.

Mentioning Wordfence on the block pages makes it easier to debug false positive blocks. Additionally, we don’t see any risk in attackers knowing which software they were blocked by. A) They could figure that out anyway if they cared and B) Trying to hide ourselves is not a reliable security principle. For more on that see the concept of “security through obscurity“.

Thanks,
Peter.

Hey @wfpeter,

With all due respect, we requested this feature over a year ago as well and nothing has been done. Please let your customers decide what’s best for them (in this case). If you want to improve sales, listen to your customers.

In our humble opinion, you guys are too slow when implementing new features.

As a temporary solution, why don’t you guys develop a code snippet that will allow us to redirect hackers (or the like) to a page of our choice?

The very-limited redirect option offered by your plugin does not work. The Wordfence block page always displays first.

Also, the “Custom text shown on blocked pages” option offered by your plugin does not help much and is not a viable solution for this request.

Please help make this happen. Soon.

Thank you!

Hi Jonathan

We have no plans to do this now or in the immediate future.

The initial reason we looked into this was because Wordfence used to not be completely translation ready. I don’t believe we are 100% translation ready but we are fairly close. The problem was that users in different countries would see a blocked page in English instead of their language. The “additional text” option was a workaround until that code was able to be translated. We’ve kept it as an option for people that want to add something like an admin email to send a message to, etc. That problem is essentially solved.

As to your comment regarding the possibility of generating more sales by implementing feature requests faster. 90% of our 4 million customers are free users. We try hard to solve their problems and include feature requests that make sense, will benefit people, and won’t cause issues (performance, breaking functionality, etc). We’ve added many things to the plugin over the years based on customer requests like the ability to “Block IPs who send POST requests with blank User-Agent and Referer”, Two Factor Authentication, and others, but we aren’t able to add everything people ask for, nor do we necessarily want to. Whether or not we generate sales doesn’t really drive the decision making process.

Mia

Hi Mia,

Thanks for your comprehensive reply.

Still, we believe that sharing with us a code snippet that will allow us to redirect a blocked page to a custom page of our choice is the best route to follow at this time. As stated before, please let us decide what’s best for us.

Also, concerning your reason (language ready) for not offering yet the solution: There are over 6,500 living (active) languages in the world. Are you saying that Wordfence will soon be translated into these 6,500 languages? (just being sarcastic, but you get our point).

Please reconsider your answer and help us make this happen. You will score many points with many developers and site owners.

If it helps, we’ll be glad to volunteer our site(s) for testing purposes before an official launch of your code snippet or feature (if and when implemented).

Thank you!

PS: We would like to bet that offering this feature with Wordfence Premium would steer many from Wordfence Free ??

We don’t supply code snippets, etc to change the way features work since we do not support changes to the code. I will suggest it to the developers for a future release but we have no plans to do this now or in the immediate future.

Mia