Request failed Status: 403 for logged out users

[ShawnS52]

Hello, I am hoping you can log in and take a look at our site to confirm this issue. I’ve checked with the webhost and they say there are no errors or blocks related to AJAX access. I have only noticed this problem since the latest update of WordPress to 6.6.2.

As some other support tickets have shown in the past, searching on the front-end of the site returns ‘The request failed. Please check your connection! Status: 403’ but searching while logged into WordPress works just fine.

I did purchase an updated license to get the latest version of the plugin but it appears to still be happening. Thank you for any help you can suggest.

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi,

I’m afraid the issue is somewhere on your end – this would have been reported by now.

The default ajax handler can be accessed, but it seems to be blocking on POST requests. The message seems to be coming from WordPress, so there might be a programmatical block of the some requests.

If you use any plugins or custom code snippets that may do changes to user permissions, accessing content, user roles or anything similar – make sure to check those as well. In WordPress the ajax search requests are registered as actions to specific handlers, where WordPress checks the permissions. If the permissions of the logged out user had been altered in some way, that could explain the issue.

[ShawnS52]

Thank you for the quick reply and explanation. I’ve realized another plugin is exhibiting the same behavior. I am unsure of what could be the cause but thank you for confirming some things for me.

[Ernest Marcinko]

You are very welcome 🙂

I hope you find out quickly. I suspect something along with user permissions – perhaps even a custom code that hooks into ajax requests and does some checks or something similar to that.

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