You are temporarily locked out

Hi @whitsey, thanks for getting in touch.

Am I right in understanding that another user’s actions has caused you to be locked out also? Unfortunately, other than waiting until the block time set in your Wordfence > All Options expires, disabling the plugin via FTP or your hosts’ control panel would be the only way for you to regain access. I’ll provide information for that below.

However, I would point to IP detection possibly being incorrect if every visitor to the site is locked out based on the actions of another user or bot. If you look up your public facing IP address at https://www.whatsmyip.org/ and visit Wordfence > Dashboard > Global Options > General Wordfence Options > How does Wordfence get IPs, does your current IP match what the site is reporting? If not, cycle through the options, do any of the values match your IP address? If so, make sure to click SAVE CHANGES if you have to alter this.

Also, Wordfence emails use the inbuilt WordPress mail send functions so doesn’t behave any differently to any other plugin you may have.

• Please use FTP/SFTP — or any file manager your web host provides via their administration panel.
• Look inside the /wp-content/plugins/ directory and rename the wordfence directory to wordfence.bak.
• Once you have logged in to your WordPress admin you can name the folder back to wordfence again.
• Refresh your dashboard and you should be able to see Wordfence Active again. If not, go to the Plugins page and Activate it.

If you are not receiving emails, the unlock emails actually come from your website and not our servers. If you aren’t getting emails then you might want to check:

• The emails (they come from [email protected]) are getting sent to your junk mail folder by your email client or provider. Make sure and whitelist or add your website to the list of safe domains so you get emails consistently.
• Your web server is having a problem with the email software on it. This isn’t like regular emails you send and receive, but rather server alert messages. Usually, a restart of postfix or sendmail (whichever is installed) can fix it. Your hosting provider may need to help with this.
• Your hosting provider has disabled SMTP from the server for some reason like preventing the server from being used to spam people.
• You have a third party plugin for sending emails with another service, like Gmail, which isn’t working. Reaching out to the plugin author for support can help.

Let me know how you get on!

Peter.

@wfpeter No, Not quite.

Another remote administrator is locked out and can’t get the email to log back in.

Has asked me to help – I want to “remove” his lock for him so he can get in.

I can log in but I can’t “release the lock” for him (or don’t know how to)

Hi @whitsey,

When somebody is currently blocked under the timescale(s) specified in Wordfence > All Options > Rate Limiting > How long is an IP address blocked when it breaks a rule or Wordfence > All Options > Brute Force Protection > Amount of time a user is locked out, they will appear on the Firewall’s blocking page.

Any IPs currently still appearing under Wordfence > Firewall > Blocking > Current blocks for… can be unblocked manually by you there. You can also check the reason they were blocked by filtering Live Traffic by the IP address. This might help you relax or alter the settings that are causing them to be blocked frequently.

Thanks,

Peter.