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Admin Tools

#42731 Locked out of Admin

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

Joomla! version
Latest
PHP version
8.1
Admin Tools version
Latest

Latest post by nicholas on Wednesday, 18 February 2026 11:37 CST

nphic

Folks,

I got locked out of my website. I can't even get to the Joomla Admin screen. I'm getting the "You are a bad person or spammer". I've had this issue before and was able to resolve using the renaming of main.php to main-disable.php in plugins/system/admintools/admintools. My issue is I don't have the second admintools folder. I attached an image of the first admintools folder. Looks different than before.

I did go through the support documentation and renamed the .htaccess and .htpassword files but that did not work either.

Any thoughts on how I can resolve this issue so I can get back into Joomla Admin?

Thanks,

Joe Rebele

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Please note that "latest" is not a version number. It is very ambiguous as there are at least two versions of Joomla (LTS and current major version) which qualify as "latest" at any given time. This has been the case since the release of Joomla 4.0 in August 2021. To make matters worse, at the time of this writing there are four versions of Joomla which would reasonably qualify as "latest": 

  • 5.4.3 is the latest LTS release.
  • 6.0.1 is the latest published release in the current major version.
  • 6.0.2 is the latest numbered (but currently unpublished) release in the current major version; it was previously published, but later retracted.
  • 6.1 Beta is the latest beta release for the current major version.

Regarding your issue, this actually tells me what the problem is:

 I've had this issue before and was able to resolve using the renaming of main.php to main-disable.php in plugins/system/admintools/admintools.

You are looking at the Joomla 3 instructions for Admin Tools 6 but you are on Joomla 4, 5, or 6 and Admin Tools 7. Please refer to this page instead: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/admin-tools-joomla/atwafissues.html Kindly note that a short link to this documentation page is emailed to you every time you save your Admin Tools component Options.

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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