Proxy & VPN Blocker

I have started seeing this error on the latest version of Awesome Support also, logging into the site with my admin account I either get a critical error or a blank page.

Seemingly this is when WordPress is attempting to do the periodic automated check where it confirms your Admin Email is still correct, but perhaps in other cases also. I disabled various plugins until I discovered that it is Awesome Support causing this.

I re-enabled Awesome Support after confirming my admin email and login works fine.

PHP Version is 8.2.x

Hi lazyym,

Sorry about this, this one was an oversight and some debugging code was left in. An update is being released ASAP.

Apologies for the delay in response.

About Custom Rules on the proxycheck.io dashboard, I just need to choose the option Block Specific Countries, type the countries and save the rule right?

Yes, that should work, but in this case it may be simpler to do this in the Plugin under ‘Locational Restrictions’ tab, type the countries you want to allow then set the list as a whitelist in the checkbox below and this will block anyone from outside of those countries. Note that in this case the list would have to include your own country or you would lose access to your site.

And for plugin settings: Turn On, Block Whole Site, set Country Restrictions and added my friends’ IPs. When I turned on Block Whole Site, I tested and it also blocked those outside the countries I blacklisted. I dunno if I did something wrong with the settings.

Sorry, I am unsure what you are asking here!

My purpose: I want to block my whole site for specific countries, VPN or not.

Do you mean you want to only block some countries, or all countries except for a small list of whitelisted countries?

Hello, no need to apologize!

It is possible that there are several issues at hand here. One of them could be that the IP Address of MonitorRSS service is being blocked by the Plugin, if you mean monitorss.xyz and you aren’t self hosting it, you would need to find what IP(s) they query your site from, and add it to the Whitelist, or a Custom Rule on the proxycheck.io dashboard, this would be especially important if you are using Block on Entire Site.

I am not too certain what could be causing your 500 error, some changes to improve some potential issues with performance will be released shortly, but whether that will solve your issues would remain to be seen.

To answer your last question, if you add a country to the block list in the Plugin settings it would block all identifiable connections from that country, VPN or not. We don’t recommend using this specific option now, and to instead, use Custom Rules on the proxycheck.io dashboard as they are far more granular.

Kind Regards,

Rick.

Hello Gumi, Sorry this happened!

That is definitely not normal! Though without some more information I’m not sure what the cause could be.

Do you by chance have a very large number of posts or pages? It could also be an incompatibility with another of your Plugins, though unlikely.

If you can share some further information, I would love to look into the issue!

Kind Regards,

Rick

Unfortunately the User Agent solution will not work, that isn’t something the API or Plugin understands, it would also open you up to User Agent spoofing if it did, because anyone who knew this could change the User Agent of their web browser (very trivial to do) and avoid the Proxy/VPN check.

Today, 3.0.1 has been released, hopefully it will solve the issue with Zapier – and other services that work in a similar way.

Kind Regards,

Rick

Hello,

You can allow the AWS IP’s by adding AS14618 and AS16509 to your Whitelist, however note that anyone can rent an instance on AWS and some VPN’s are run through it, which is why they are often detected as such by proxycheck.io, so it’s perhaps not a good idea to do that, but it is your choice.

I will also look for an alternative solution.

Kind Regards,

Rick

Hello janon123,

Thank you for your nice words!

The good news is that this is simple with the custom rules available on your proxycheck dashboard. If you go to the Custom Rules tab on your dashboard you will see a button “Toggle Rules Library” if you click on the blue button for “Proxycheck.io managed Rules” there is one there for “Allow iCloud Private Relay”, if you add this, you should be good to go!

https://i.imgur.com/5MLVLlU.png

Then, save the rule that appears below, then toggle it on.

I hope this helps.

Rick – Proxy & VPN Blocker

Hello,

May I ask if the original issue is resolved? If I understand your replies, It seems to have been issues with your site/SSL and the plugin is functioning now?

Hello,

It is possible this is from a misconfiguration of your settings for the setting “Remote Visitor IP Header” under the Main tab of PVB Settings, What does it say here? It should normally be set to $_SERVER[“REMOTE_ADDR”]. or the Cloudflare header if you use Cloudflare.

Hi lazyym,

This isn’t normal, can you tell me if you were seeing wp-cron.php showing up in your logs on proxycheck.io, or how you concluded that wp-cron is being blocked by the plugin if it isn’t showing up in the logs there?

I will also publish an update that contains some updated code for this wp-cron and a unrelated (but shares the same part of code) fix for people using matomo analytics plugin which may have also been blocked when requests are coming from the servers own IP address. It is possible that this is also your issue and the servers own IP address is being caught up in the check.

Thank you,

Rick – Proxy & VPN Blocker

Hello Natarem,

This wouldn’t be the expected behaviour unless you are using the Risk Score option and the VPN falls below the risk score defined.

I understand that you are using a cache, which cache plugin is this? There is now a feature under Block Pages/Posts tab to force Do Not Cache Page headers on the pages selected for blocking, that may be worth a try. Though those pages should already not be cached like you mention.

Dear marisol3007,

I’m sorry that you did not receive the signup email from proxycheck.io. We have spoken with their support and their email services have not suffered any outages to their knowledge, we would kindly ask that you check your spam folder and if possible contact Proxycheck support over at https://proxycheck.io or email [email protected] with the same email you signed up with and they can assist you directly to find your account and send you your API key.

Hello,

The Country blocking part remains unchanged and I just tested this and found it to still be working.

However, you can create a custom rule within your account on proxycheck.op/dashboard You will find the option under Custom Rules > Toggle Rule Library > Locational, here there are partially configured options to block a specific country, or multiple countries. These would go in the ‘Your Values’ box and can be comma seperated, Then you would save the Rule and then click the toggle to activate it.

Hi Bob, that is a good point.

I can look into this, but in the meantime you can still select them on the Posts/Pages lists with the bulk actions.

Thank you,

Rick