Wordfence - HTTP response code 403

[tdechangy (Thibault de Changy)]

Hi, I enable the MainWP plugin on a pure fresh install but I have this 403 error notice by Wordfence. This is quite strange since Wordfence is not placed on this site as subdomain, neither on its parent domain. It is installed on other sub-domains but I don’t see any firewall alerts there.

Maybe is this redirect to the settings page using a wrong way.. ?

[tdechangy (Thibault de Changy)]

I finally found how to solve this following multiple posts on the Wordpfence support pages :

403 Forbidden error with Wordfence and MainWP Dashboard plugin version 3.4

Basically, Wordfence firewall (if activated since it’s an option) operates on all sub-domains, even when it is installed only on subdomains.
To solve the issue you can :

• safest : put WF in “learning mode” for all those domains (https://www.wordfence.com/help/firewall/learning-mode/#how-to-use-learning-mode)
• deactivate - do your work - reactivate for all those domains.

hope this will help many users while there is maybe something strange on the mainWP side since such issue shouldn’t rise. Please MainWP team, check this to avoid such security issues.

[dennis (Dennis Dornon)]

@tdechangy

Please MainWP team, check this to avoid such security issues.

We won’t do anything to work around WordFence’s security policies, this would just leave both MainWP and you open to potential issues. I would recommend following their instructions or whitelisting your Dashboard IP.