Below are 5 common mistakes that you probably make when using Prevent Direct Access Gold & Its Extensions.
#1 Remove the Lite version when installing Prevent Direct Access Gold
Since version 3.2.0, the Lite version is required for our PDA Gold to work properly. This helps simplify and ease the data migration and upgrade process across our 2 versions.
Therefore, to make sure everything works nicely, do not remove our Lite version when purchasing or installing our PDA Gold.
#2 Always “Enable Debug Log”
The debug logs provide a fast and easy way for us to help you track and troubleshoot when issues happen. What it does is to log our plugin’s main features from which those issues could possibly arise. Our plugin also tracks fatal errors caused by your theme and other plugins as well, if any.
It’s not an option that you should always enable as it keeps logging all WordPress and PHP errors of your entire website including your theme and other plugins and not just ours. That action could undoubtedly slow down your website especially when there are a lot of errors and warning codes.
In short, only enable the debug log when you’re having issues with our plugin.
#3 Issues with Prevent Direct Access Gold License
You can install and use our Gold version on websites that you own or are an active developer, in which the maximum number of websites cannot exceed your license counts (1 for Single; 3 for Plus and 15 for Pro).
For some reason, you may decide to uninstall our plugin from your website. Once uninstalled, all the plugin data but your license key (and purchase information) is removed. The reason we still keep your license key and order information in the database is to allow you to re-install our plugin back on the same website.
A potential problem with this occurs when you try to install our plugin on more websites that your license allows. Your action will cause WordPress to store a wrong license and purchase information on that website’s database, which complicates your license upgrade process later on.
We’ve recently built a setting option that allows you to remove your license and purchase information from a website’s database. Having said that, please be careful with this option. Once your license information is cleared, you have to upgrade or get another license to use our plugin on the same website.
License Upgrade
Check out this article on how you can upgrade your current license.
#4 Set the Same Private Link Prefix
Prevent Direct Access Gold and Protect Pages & Posts Gold are working perfectly together to help you protect your private files and content respectively. Just make sure you’ve set a different private link prefix on each plugin’s settings:
Otherwise, there will be a conflict which stops the 2 plugins from working properly.
#5 Have a physical robots.txt file
We make use of a so-called “virtual robots.txt” generated by WordPress to block search indexing for your private and confidential files dynamically. However, if you have a physical robots.txt file on your server, it will override and stop our virtual one from working. So please make sure you remove your robots.txt file at the root folder of your domain directory so that our virtual rules work correctly.
