Eric Beaty

Okay, so I think I’ve finally solved the problem. I’ve decided to go with the security plugin All In One WP Security & Firewall by a developer called Tips and Tricks HQ. It allows me much better control over what features are enabled.

Anyway, the issue was mainly with the settings having to do with Captcha. Since the login screen for the plugin I use for my online courses does not offer a Captcha, only username and password, I obviously couldn’t check an invisible captcha box the plugins (both AIOWPS and WordFence) thought were on the page. And since it didn’t detect any such captcha box, I was naturally being blocked from logging in.

I’ve contacted my courses plugin developers about adding some sort of Captcha box on the login and registration pages for future instances of these types of problems.

I hope this helps anyone else who might be struggling with this issue. I’ve been able to enable most features in the AIOWPS plugin without locking anyone out. The steps I used to reproduce/troubleshoot this issue was to manually click each feature, log out of my admin account, then log into the course with the user’s info. If it let me log in to the course, I knew the feature could stay enabled; if not, I logged back into my admin account, disabled it, and continued checking the other security features this way, one at a time, until all of the features I could keep—without blocking customers/users—were enabled.

Definitely a long process, but now I have a secure site with more control that doesn’t block my customers!

Just tried renaming the Wordfence folder, which allowed me to log in with the user’s credentials, but after naming it back it wouldn’t let me log in again. I contacted one of my plugin providers who said that WordPress deals with all the login info, so Wordfence must be blocking either the user or action and to try checking Wordfence to see if there’s a specific setting I need to configure. Problem is, I’ve checked everywhere in Wordfence and can’t find any specific login settings.

Where would I edit this code? In my main .css file?