ShieldPRO 11.3 Upgrade Guide

ShieldPRO 11.3 is a release designed to bring improvements to the Bot Scoring logic changes introduced in Shield 11.2. This release makes Shield smarter at distinguishing bots vs people.

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

This ShieldPRO 11.3 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: Probing Bots - 404 Bot Signal

404s encountered for requests for assets such as images, javascript and CSS no longer trigger offenses. The 1 exception is if the asset URL is within a plugin/theme directory that doesn't exist on the site. 

File types:

js, css, woff, woff2, gif, jpg, jpeg, png, map. 

It won't trigger an offense, it'll just log them (audit trail). 

You can read more about this here. 

New added features

For 11.3 release we added
The IP address will still accumulate offenses and will still be subject to Shield’s rules, but, if the number of offenses would normally lead to an IP address being blocked, but the IP reputation is good enough, the block will not be put in-place.

You can think of it like: Shield will see everything your IP does, and it’ll mark offenses against it. Once the IP has accumulated enough offenses and it’s about to block your IP address, it’ll lookup your Bot Reputation Score and if it’s high enough, you wont be blocked.

  • Bot Scoring Logic is provisioned from ShieldNET API

    To allow for easier and faster updates and improvements to the bot scoring logic, they are served from our ShieldNET API. If, for whatever reason, the API is unavailable the plugin will use its built-in scoring logic.
  • NotBot Javascript Loading Check

    The NotBot Javascript that loads for visitor is critical to Shield's ability to detect bots - we now show a warning when we can't detect it.

For more information on Shield 11.3 release, read the blog article here.