Hi @jbello, thanks for getting in touch.
As I don’t have a valid way of accessing your site I don’t see any clues from superficial things like your login page’s URL, the browser console where scripts might be failing etc.
Do you also have reCAPTCHA and/or 2FA enabled for your users? If so, are they enabled through other plugins or Wordfence’s “Login Security” options? Are you seeing specific errors on-page when trying to log in and does it fail at the username/password stage or after that, such as when entering a 2FA code? It’d be great if you could paste the error here.
If you’re able to reactivate Wordfence whilst logged in (renaming the plugin folder back to “wordfence” if that’s how you’ve been disabling it), a diagnostic report might be useful so we can check for problems. You can send that to wftest @ wordfence . com directly from the link at the top of the Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics page. Then click on “Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and respond here again after you have sent it.
NOTE: It should look as follows – Screenshot of Tools > Diagnostic > Send by Email
Many thanks,
Peter.
Thread Starter
jbello
(@jbello)
Thanks for your reply, Peter. Of course the login page gives no information. I was just filling out the field, I guess. Of course I wouldn’t put an internal page on the open forum either. The error message is pretty neutral: “ERROR: An error was encountered while trying to authenticate. Please try again” There are only 3 users on the account. I am the administrator/super-administrator of the multisite and there is a woman who has an editor login. I use 2FA with the google tool on my phone while she doesn’t use 2FA. She is in Ramallah Palestine, and I am in the U.S. The site is in a reseller account I have hosted on GreenGeeks. It is an old account that I inherited from one that was hosted somewhere in the Middle East after she had a problem with the person managing it, but that was a couple/few years ago. He may have been trying to log in recently. I I saw his name (bassel) among the failed logins along with mine (gazett-admin) and the editor (amal) in the wflogin file.
When my login initially failed, after a couple of attempts, I clicked the ‘Forgot my password’ link and used the email to create a new password with no problem. But, when I tried to actually use the new password to log in, it failed with the same error. I don’t type the password in, so I didn’t make a mistake. I keep my passwords in a password keeper and copy them out. I was able, finally, to access the account through Softaculous on the CPanel, and that’s when it occurred to me that Wordfence might be the culprit. I was unable to successfully uninstall it (without deleting all it’s data), so I just renamed the folder. Without it, we have no problem logging in.
If you think it will help you figure out what’s going on, I can list out some of the tables from the wordfence installation. Also, speaking of tables, there are 2 databases for the site, one for each installation (Arabic and English). So maybe WF is having trouble with the multisite. I would really like to know whats going on because I have wordfence on all of my sites.
buongiorno anche io riscontro lo stesso problema con wordfence attivo non riesco ad accedere rinominando la cartella del plugin tramite file manager in modo da disattivare il plugin l’accesso funziona correttamente
