ShieldPRO 11.2 Upgrade Guide

ShieldPRO for WordPress v11.2 is a release designed to build upon the improvements we’ve seen so far in Shield 11 series.

We’re making a few enhancements to the AntiBot scoring system, adding a revamped Wizard and finally making it possible to add Shield’s two-factor authentication UI anywhere on your site.

You can get more information about this in the release blog post here.

Important point to note: If you use 3rd party plugins, you'll need to go to the Integration settings to ensure your integration is selected after you upgrade to Shield 11.2. We just enabled it silently by default in earlier versions, but now it needs to be selected. Shield will try to do it automatically during the upgrade. 

This ShieldPRO 11.2 Upgrade Guide outlines what have been added/removed, changed, or improved and what fixes we've made.

Firstly, we're going to explain what major changes are made and which options you'd need to review.

Change 1: New and improved Welcome Wizard

All-New Welcome Wizard designed to get you up and running with Shield quickly and effortlessly. 

In this release we’ve revamped it entirely, with a new style/design, better content, new videos and a more intuitive UX.

                                                                            Old Wizard

                                                                              New Wizard

Change 2: AntiBot detection scoring improvements

ShieldPRO‘s new AntiBot Detection Engine has been a great success so far with its ability to detect bad bots without any CAPTCHAs.
We’ve incorporated much of customers' feedback into the 11.2 release. Some of changes we’ve made include:
  • Improved Bot Scoring logic
  • Better Bot Score Reset
  • Faster NotBot execution
  • No more Cookies

We've adjusted some of the bot scoring and improved the ability to detect legitimate users based on earlier logins. We've also removed the need for the small cookie that was needed to help track the NotBot status. The AntiBot Detection Engine can now be disabled by setting the minimum reputation score to 0. 

We go into the further details on this here. 

Change 3: New and improved integrations

Shield’s AntiBot Detection Engine (ADE) can assess a visitor right up until it submits a form and so it has a very good idea of what the likely profile of the visitor is. It also removes the need for any CAPTCHAs or human “gotchas” on any of your forms.

We added support for 

  • protecting Groundhogg CRM forms from bots

  • protecting contact forms against SPAM in the Super Forms plugin

  • protecting LifterLMS login & registration forms from bots

Change 4: New UI design for the Overview section

We removed the section of all the module names for filtering the "issues".

It now just displays danger, warning, info and good statuses. 

We also added Shield issues highlighter (icons). Green (good - option enabled), Red (security issue - option disabled). You can use these icons to easily access the particular plugin option to review settings. 

Change 5: Sidebar navigation and WP main menu: Sections renamed

We renamed "Settings" section to "Configuration", and "Integrations" to "3rd Party Integrations". 

Change 6: Brand new Knowledgebase integration

We've moved to a brand new Helpdesk/Knowledgebase and this allows us to integrate instant access to docs inside the plugin itself. Simply click the 'Info' link for any option to view documentation within your WordPress admin area. 

                                                                             Examples

New added features

For 11.2 release we added

You can now add exactly the same 2FA/MFA user interface as seen in the WordPress admin area, to the frontend with the use of a simple WordPress shortcode.

                                                     Example, user profile in the WP admin area 

                                                                 Your frontend or customer area 

Improvements

We've made the following improvements

  • 11.2 release
    • Google Authenticator QR codes are generated locally.
      Google's Legacy Chart API wasn't always loading the QR code so we replaced it with a locally generated QR code image. 
  • 11.2.3 release
    • Adjust default bot scoring logic to reduce spam.
  • 11.2.4 release
    • Adjust default bot scoring logic to reduce spam.

Fixes

We've made the following fixes

  •  11.2 release
    • The tour system would run multiple times.
  • 11.2.1 release
    • Some plugin SQL query syntax broke on MySQL 8.
  • 11.2.2 release
    • Fatal error when initiating WP-CLI in some cases.
  • 11.2.4 release
    • Some clients reported a fatal error in certain circumstances.

For more information on Shield 11.2 release, read the blog article here.