s2Member and CloudFlare

I’m seeing a lot of s2members using cloudflare recently and would just like to point out a problem I’m seeing.

Cloudflare acts as a proxy server infront of your website passing clients to your site through theirs. That means that php, wordpress and s2member see everybody as the same person(cloudflare).

Thats going to cause problems with IP restrictions, Brute force attacks, download keys and the WordPress commenting system.

s2Members default restriction settings allow 5 max failed login attempts, so if somebody fails 5 times everybody will be locked out including you, because everybody is using the same IP address(Cloudflares).

Fortunately there is a way to fix this but will probably require root access to your server as you will, depending on your setup have to install an addition module. Please see this link for guidance https://www.cloudflare.com/wiki/Log_Files

So I don’t think cloudflare is going to be compatible in a shared hosting environment unless your provider has partnered with cloudflare.

Also Cloudflare should not be active when trying to debug problems, it will cache the problem and will make it very hard to resolve.

Thanks for the heads up! I’ll keep it in mind if someone reports a weird case of users locked out because of those IP restrictions.