Wordfence 7.8.0 Is Out! Here Is What Is Included

Wordfence 7.8.0 is out! A huge thanks to our quality assurance team, our team of developers and our ops team for planning, implementing and releasing Wordfence 7.8.0. This release has several fixes to make Wordfence even more robust, and includes a fundamental change in the way our signup works.

Since our launch in 2012, the signup flow for Wordfence has not required you to leave your own WordPress installation and come to our website. We briefly required this, but removed it 10 days after launch.

Wordfence has grown to a community of over 4 million active websites and a very large number of paying customers. Wordfence is now downloaded over 30,000 times every day. Today we spend a huge amount of money on providing the services that our free and paid community needs to stay secure. Privacy laws have also changed profoundly since 2012.

Scaling up our operations has required us to get better at capacity planning, which means knowing how many installations we’re getting, how many are bots or spam, who is communicating with our servers during a scan, and whether it is a real website running Wordfence, a nulled plugin or someone simply using our resources to power something unrelated to Wordfence.

Privacy laws have also added the need for us to be able to communicate with our free customers to alert them to privacy policy and terms of use changes.

This has required us to adjust our signup flow to match other popular plugins out there, like Akismet. Many customers may find this is a clearer signup workflow because we no longer need to shoehorn a complex user experience into a set of modals on a site where we don’t control presentation.

This change will not disrupt any of our existing free or paid customers. If you have a free API key that Wordfence automatically fetched when you installed it, that key will remain valid and your site will continue uninterrupted. If you have a paid Wordfence API key, your key will continue to work without disruption. We are not requiring any existing customers to visit our site to install a new key.

The only users this affects are new free Wordfence installations. The installation process is quite simple. You install Wordfence and are directed to our site. You can choose a paid or free option. If you choose the paid option, you’ll go through our checkout process as usual. If you choose free, we’ll email you your key. The email includes a button that you can click to automatically take you back to your site where your key will be automatically installed. The email also includes your Wordfence key in case you need to manually install it.

A side benefit of this new process is that our free customers will now have a record of their API key in their email inbox for future reference.

If you have any questions related to this change, our customer service team is standing by to assist you on our forums for free customers, and via our ticket system for paid customers. We welcome your input.

We’re including the full changelog for Wordfence 7.8.0 below. You’ll notice that we’ve mentioned that additional WooCommerce support is on its way, so keep an eye out for that.

Thanks for choosing Wordfence!

Mark Maunder – Wordfence Founder & CEO.

Wordfence 7.8.0 Changelog

Change: Updated Wordfence registration workflow

For new installations of Wordfence, registering for a new license key now occurs on wordfence.com instead of within the plugin interface. Allows us to provide a more complete signup experience for our free and paid customers. Also allows us to do better capacity planning.

Improvement: Added feedback when login form is submitted with 2FA

When logging in with two-factor authentication, the “Log In” button is now disabled during processing, so that it is clear the button was clicked. Sometimes on slower sites, it was hard to tell whether the login was going through, leading users to click more than once.

Fix: Restored click support on login button when using 2FA with WooCommerce

Clicking the “Log In” button after entering a 2FA code on a WooCommerce site was no longer working, while pressing “Enter” still worked. Both methods now work as expected. Additional support for WooCommerce is coming in the near future.

Fix: Corrected display issue with reCAPTCHA score history graph

The reCAPTCHA score history graph was sometimes displayed larger than intended when switching tabs. It now has a set size, so that it does not become unusually large.

Fix: Prevented errors on PHP caused by corrupted login timestamps

One Wordfence user reported an error on PHP 8, and upon investigation, we found that a timestamp for some user records contained invalid data instead of the expected timestamp. We don’t expect this to occur on other sites, but in case another plugin had modified the value, we now check the value before formatting it as a timestamp.

Fix: Prevented deprecation notices on PHP 8.2 related to dynamic properties

Future versions of PHP will no longer allow use of variables on an object unless they are previously declared. This is still allowed even in PHP 8.2, but PHP 8.2 can log a warning about the upcoming change, so Wordfence has been updated to declare a few variables where necessary, before using them.