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#42571 Documentation is wrong for WAF lockout

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
5.3
PHP version
n/a
Admin Tools version
n/a

Latest post by nicholas on Friday, 19 December 2025 11:46 CST

Friday, 19 December 2025 11:19 CST

karjoco

Your documentation on this page is incorrect:

https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/troubleshooter/atwafissues.html

Using FTP to regain access to your site's administrator

The failsafe way to regain access to your site's administrator backend is using an FTP application or your hosting control panel's File Manager to rename a file.

Go inside the plugins/system/admintools/admintools directory on your site (on older versions of Admin Tools: plugins/system/admintools). You will see a file named main.php. Rename it to main-disable.php. This will turn disable the Web Application Firewall from executing and you can access your site's back-end again.

After you have fixed the cause of your issue remember to rename main-disable.php back to main.php, otherwise your site will remain unprotected!

 

No such directory exists (plugins/system/admintools/admintools) and there is no "main.php" file anywhere to be found. HELP! (and please update your documentation...I've encountered this multiple times with various websites I manage.

Thanks

Kara

Friday, 19 December 2025 11:46 CST

nicholas

You are looking at the wrong documentation. That's a relic from the Joomla 3.7 days, still made available for those folks who have to deal with old sites to get information out of them, update them, or put them out of their misery.

The correct documentation page for Admin Tools 7 and later version has been https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/admin-tools-joomla/atwafissues.html since August 2021.

It's been more than four years now. The new documentation versions are at the very top of the documentation page. Admin Tools sends you an email with links to these new pages. There are links to these pages from the software itself. The documentation is also available as an ePUB e-book in the same download page as the software. There's literally nothing else I can do beyond I am already doing for you to read the correct documentation page.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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