What is the Prove your Humanity login feature in WordPress

- by

Screen Shot 2015-04-21 at 08.31.32

Some of my clients have recently noticed a new math question on their WordPress login screen. It prompts to Prove your humanity in addition to your user name and password.

This feature was recently introduced in Jetpack as part of the Protect Feature, which prevents hackers from trying to gain access to your WordPress site via brute-force attacks. Prove your humanity means that bots have a hard time logging in. You can even see how many times Jetpack has prevented unsuccessful login attempts.

To remove the math question you can whitelist your own IP so that Jetpack knows you’re logging in from a legitimate address. To do this, login to your admin interface and head over to Jetpack – Settings – find the Protect Feature and hit Configure. This brings up a window similar to the one below.

Screen_Shot_2015-04-23_at_09_38_18

You will see your current IP address. Add it to the list and click save – and you won’t see the additional math question again, provided you login from the same IP. Repeat the process and add additional IPs if needed. If you have multiple users on your team who all contribute to the site, ask them to provide their IP via http://whatsmyip.org or similar services.

If you’ve been accidentally logged out can cannot gain access to WordPress anymore, you can add a single IP address to your wp-config.php file by defining the following constant:

define('JETPACK_IP_ADDRESS_OK', '12.34.56.78');

Replace 12.34.56.78 with your actual IP address (obviously).



If you enjoy my content, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi. In return you can browse this whole site without any pesky ads! More details here.

7 thoughts on “What is the Prove your Humanity login feature in WordPress”

Leave a Comment!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.