Wordfence Firewall is blocking Facebook despite Allowlisted services setting

  • I went to rescrape a page on my website using Facebook’s debugger tool, and it would not update the metadata there, instead giving me the error Curl error: 28 (OPERATION_TIMEOUTED).

    I adjusted my caching based on other people having this issue, and it still gave me the error.

    Based on further research, I disabled Wordfence, and only then was Facebook able to scrape my page properly.

    I checked the Firewall settings, and Facebook is supposed to be an Allowlisted service be default, but Wordfence is still blocking it anyway. Please help me solve this issue.

    Thanks!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @o3internet, thanks for your message and sorry to see you’re having some trouble with this.

    Allowlisted services in relation to Facebook should certainly allow things like post/image previews when posting links to your site on Facebook as their service will go and scrape the page for information to display.

    If these are working, maybe Wordfence is seeing the debugger as a manual action rather than an allowed Facebook service. Learning Mode could help here. From the Wordfence Dashboard click on Manage WAF. Then you will see Basic Firewall Options > Web Application Firewall Status. Change the option to Learning Mode. This will help Wordfence learn that any actions during this time are normal and it will allow them in the future.

    During this time, try to use the Facebook debugging tool.

    Afterwards, switch the WAF from Learning Mode back to Enabled and Protecting.

    Let me know if you continue to have problems after doing this and we’ll look further into it.

    Thanks,

    Peter.

    Thread Starter O3 Internet Consulting

    (@o3internet)

    I actually did put my site in Learning Mode yesterday, and the Facebook Debugger did not work, even after some time had passed.

    HOWEVER, I tried it again today, and the Facebook Debugger worked! I think there must have been some caching at some level (website, browser, Wordfence, or Facebook) preventing it from registering the changes, and it just needed a full day to register them.

    So yes, putting Wordfence Firewall back to Learning Mode resolved my issue with Facebook Debugger timing out.

    Thank you so much!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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