The Playground

I've been using the AutoBan plugin from Solid Wall of Code for some time and am deeply impressed at it's ability to ban spammers, but yesterday I found myself locked out. I eliminated lots of reasons before I thought it was AutoBan. When I looked at the .htaccess file in MT I discovered that the upgrade to 3.34 had cleaned it out. Therein lay the problem.

I was able to gain access by White Listing my IP address after reading the following:

MTAutoBan has its own section of the .htaccess file and preserves content outside of its area when updating the file. This is done so that other, non MTAutoBan directives can be kept in the file. The most common expected use of this feature is white listing, i.e. allowing specific hosts / IP addresses access regardless of what AutoBan does. For example, if your ISP supplied IP addresses was 192.168.56.56, you might want to white list it to decrease the risk of losing access. To do that, you would put the following in the .htaccess file.

order deny,allow
allow from 192.168.56.56

Deleting the .htaccess file is supposed to reset the plugin, but this didn't work. I had to delete the plugin and the file, and re-install after I was able to get back in.