1. Introduction

1.1. 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 [1] 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 [2] 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.

1.2. 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.

Footnotes

[1]It took me a while to realise that Microsoft really do want to turn Windows 10 into a toy, but I got there eventually.
[2]In the interests of full disclosure: I’m a Founding Committee Member and at the time of writing, Security Team Lead.