Year: 2017

  • Wordfence Reviews – Find them on WordPress.org

    I’m posting this to help our customers find objective Wordfence reviews. If you are short on time and would like to view objective, reliable reviews for Wordfence that are moderated by volunteer WordPress moderators to remove spam, you can visit the Wordfence plugin review page on WordPress.org.

    I’m the founder and CEO of Wordfence. We make the most popular firewall and malware scanner for WordPress. We also offer a site cleaning and site security audit service.

    If you do a google search for ‘wordfence reviews’ or ‘wordfence review’, it is quite likely that the first page of results may contain a competitor who has posted something that appears to be an ‘objective’ wordfence review on his personal blog. That was posted in 2012 and I think it’s quite unreasonable for us to expect a direct competitor to have anything good to say about us, which he didn’t. 🙂

    The hosting landscape is complex and there are many affiliate and business partnerships between security companies, hosting companies etc. It’s like spaghetti. For example, one major security company is owned by the founders of a huge hosting conglomerate. In another case, a major security company was bought by one of the largest hosting companies but still trades under it’s own brand. And then there are affiliate schemes or ‘kickbacks’ that motivate bloggers to write great reviews for one security provider and bad reviews for another.

    The bottom line is that it can be challenging to find objective reviews for Wordfence. The good news is that there is a source that you can rely on, it is 100% objective and it is controlled by a group of volunteer moderators who are awesome and who do a great job of removing spam and making sure that all reviews stay objective.

    Your most reliable and objective source of Wordfence reviews is the WordPress plugin repository.

    The plugin repository is where we distribute Wordfence. It is an open source collection of plugins available for WordPress. Anyone who uses a plugin and has signed up for a wordpress.org account can post a review on this page.

    The moderators who filter out spam are volunteers and they do a really great job of making sure vendors don’t ‘stuff’ good reviews into their product. They also make sure that competitors don’t come in and spam reviews to make someone else look bad.

    If you have a support issue related to Wordfence, I would also encourage you to search our forums for a solution or post there if you need help. We have dedicated team members who reply to our free customers in the forums. Our awesome support is why we have so many great reviews and a 5 star rating.

    Wordfence reviews

    Wordfence also has premium support for our paid customers which you can find at support.wordfence.com.

    I hope this blog post has cleared up any confusion on where to find objective and reliable Wordfence reviews.

    Regards,

    Mark Maunder – Wordfence founder/ceo.

    PS: Reviews like this one below from one of our customers really made my day. It also made Phil’s day. Phil is the security analyst who helped Mike recover from a hacked site. This review was posted today. Mike is one of many happy customers who have used Wordfence to help stay secure.

    Wordfence review

     

  • Why the term "cyber" is cool.

    In 1986 William Gibson published Neuromancer, his masterpiece. In it he coined the term ‘cyberspace’. For many of us it described the world of ‘computers’ at the time. It captured the experience of disappearing into code.

    Later ‘cyberspace’ was an uncannily accurate metaphor for getting online and disappearing into, for me, the telephone networks through phone phreaking and later the Internet and the text based online communities like IRC, NNTP, telnet based MUDs and so on.

    The term ‘cyber’ is now mocked by those in information security as something uncool. I’m not sure why but I think it’s because the term has been coopted by companies trying to sell products in cyber security.

    For me and I think many others, ‘cyber’ and ‘cyberspace’ are precious reminders of the beauty of Gibson’s writing and how he accidentally captured the reality that was to follow in a beautiful metaphor.

    This is my favorite passage from Neuromancer as Case is cured and once again is able to access cyberspace. What I love about this passage is that it captures the sense of longing many of us have when we exist in the real world and the sense of belonging when we’re online.

    And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes
boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking
past like film compiled from random frames.  Symbols, figures,
faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
  Please, he prayed, _now --_
  A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
  _Now --_
  Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler
gray.  Expanding --
  And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the
unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent
3D chessboard extending to infinity.  Inner eye opening to the
stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Au-
thority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of
America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms
of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
  And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his
face.