Hi Eris,
Thanks for reaching out, and good thinking wanting to protect your site from that kind of probing activity, that’s exactly what this plugin is for!
The form disappearing issue is an unusual one, in 13 years I’ve not come across this before, which suggests it’s likely a conflict specific to your setup rather than anything in the plugin itself. My best guess would be a JavaScript conflict between Stop User Enumeration and another plugin or your theme.
To help track this down, could you let me know:
- What theme you’re using?
- What other plugins you have active?
The quickest way to investigate would be to try reproducing it in a clean environment. You can spin up a free test WordPress site at somewhere like TasteWP (tastewp.com) or WP Playground (wordpress.org/playground) — install just this plugin and your theme and see if the issue appears. If it doesn’t, adding plugins back one at a time will usually reveal the culprit quickly.
It would also help if there’s a page with the affected form that’s publicly viewable, even a test page , so I can take a look at what’s happening from the outside.
The Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin (wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/) is also really handy for this kind of investigation, it lets you troubleshoot with plugins disabled without affecting your live site visitors, which makes narrowing things down much safer and easier.
Hi Eris,
Having looked more carefully at the code, our JavaScript does load when you’re logged in on the frontend. It only skips the WordPress admin area, so a JS conflict is possible.
Our script is very tightly scoped though. It only looks for a field with the ID #author inside a form with the ID #commentform. It cannot directly hide other forms. What’s more likely is that our script is causing a JavaScript error that then prevents another plugin’s script from running correctly, and that other script is what renders your forms.
The quickest way to confirm this is to open your browser’s developer tools (usually F12), go to the Console tab, and load the page with the broken forms. Any JavaScript errors showing there will point straight at the conflict.
Also worth knowing: the JS is only loaded if the “Remove numbers from comment authors” option is ticked in the plugin settings. If you don’t use standard WordPress comments, unticking that will stop the script loading entirely, which would rule out any JS conflict immediately. This is worth doing to confirm if it is indeed a JS conflict.
