.. _introduction: ============ Introduction ============ .. _history: History ------- As with many Open Source projects, `ẀP fail2ban` started as way to scratch a particular itch. I had a dedicated server that was getting some unwelcome attention from various bots, and while it was trivial to configure `fail2ban` for ``ssh`` etc, WordPress was another story. Thus `WP fail2ban` was born late November 2011. Since then it's slowly but steadily accumulated features, and much to my surprise, gained a considerable number of installs (30,000+ at the time of writing) - I really had no idea so many other people would be interested! Between versions 3.5 and 3.6 there was a bit of a delay. I switched my development environment from Windows 10 [#f1]_ to a FreeBSD workstation and a Linux laptop, life then decided to take its turn and get in the way for a bit, all while the shadow of Gutenberg loomed large over the future of WordPress. With the advent of `ClassicPress `_ [#f2]_ things started to look sunnier, so I dusted off the repo, put together some better documentation, braved the horrors of ``svn``, and in November 2018 released 3.6 as a pseudo 7th anniversary present. .. _future: Future ------ Version 4 was born from a desire to visualise the things *WPf2b* was logging; being entirely separate and distinct from the core functionality, adding this as freemium features seemed like a good plan. Time will tell. This logical separation will continue for all future versions - if you were happy with the way 3.6 worked you'll be happy with future versions too. .. rubric:: Footnotes .. [#f1] It took me a while to realise that Microsoft really do want to turn Windows 10 into a toy, but I got there eventually. .. [#f2] In the interests of full disclosure: I'm a Founding Committee Member and at the time of writing, Security Team Lead.