Troubleshooting
Bots Still Appearing in Analytics
Check protection is on
Confirm Protection Enabled is on in Settings → ScraperBlock.
Verify the bot signature
Check that the bot's user-agent string is on the blocklist - bots frequently change UA strings.
Understand analytics capture timing
Analytics platforms typically record sessions before WordPress loads, so bot analytics may come from browser-injected analytics scripts, not PHP-level blocks.
Legitimate Users Getting 429 Errors
Raise the threshold
Increase the Requests Per Minute setting (try 120 or higher).
Check for parallel sub-requests
Confirm whether a page is generating many parallel sub-requests (REST API calls, AJAX).
Exempt high-request pages
Use the Exempt from Rate Limit per-page option for known high-request pages.
Htaccess Rules Not Written
Check file permissions
Verify your .htaccess file is writable (chmod 644 minimum).
Confirm Apache server
Ensure your server is Apache (not Nginx).
Check for duplicate block markers
Confirm that the # BEGIN ScraperBlock / # END ScraperBlock block does not already exist from a previous manual edit.