Wordfence – Can’t creat new user

Hey @chesterfordgreen,

The quickest way back into the site will be to rename the Wordfence plugin directory to something like wordfence.bak via sFTP or your hosting control panel.

Once you’re back in, can you please deactivate Wordfence to make sure it’s contributing to the user creation issue?

Please let me know.

Thanks,

Gerroald

Hi Gerroald,

Thanks for the advice, but I am very reluctant to deactivate Wordfence at present as I am currently experiencing about 20 brute force attempts an hour!

I have found the same issues on three separate websites; ie once I set up the 2FA for myself as main admin I then cannot create any other users at all. Any attempt to login in on a new account says that the password is incorrect, even though it has just been set up.

I am wondering if it has anything to do with running the free version? The website say “Two-factor authentication was previously a premium feature, but is now available to sites running the free version of Wordfence as well.”

Since these are small club websites it would be too expensive to go premium on all them…

Thanks for your help – John

Hey @chesterfordgreen,

I understand the reluctancy to deactivate Wordfence. However, we need to be certain that it’s the actual issue seeing we haven’t seen other cases like this.

Please consider quickly disabling Wordfence to see if it resolves it and let me know how it goes.

Thanks,

Gerroald

Hi Gerroald,

Okay, I have now deactivated Wordfence as suggested and have come up with some very strange results…

1) When deactivated, I was able to create a new user
2) When reactivated, I was able to log in as that user
3) When I tried to make any changes to that user with Wordfence activated (such as change password or set up a 2FA) then I got ‘The username or password is incorrect’as previously notified.

I tried this three times and got the same result each time…
Rather bizarre eh?

Cheers – John

Hey @chesterfordgreen,

This does sound a little bizarre.

Are you able to disable all other plugins and run the test again to rule out a conflict?

Please let me know.

Thanks,

Gerroald

Hi Gerroald,

Got it!

Deactivated all plugins and everything worked fine. Activated them one by one until it didn’t work.

The plugin that stopped it working was reCaptcha by BestWebSoft.

To be honest I’m not sure why i had this installed in the first place, but all seems to be fine!

Thanks very much for your patience and knowledge…

Cheers – John

Hey @chesterfordgreen,

Thanks for the update, and happy to hear you were able to track it down!

I’m sure you know this, but for the sake of being thorough, I’d like to mention that Wordfence does have a CAPTCHA feature.

https://www.wordfence.com/help/login-security/#captcha-options

Please do let us know if anything else comes up.

Thanks,

Gerroald

Cheers Gerroald!

I’m now happy to say that myself and another can use 2FA when logging into our website.

I’ve certainly learnt from this and hopefully if anyone contacts you with a similar issue then they will benefit as well.

You’re a star!

Cheers – John