I do not know quite what made me do it, but I went to the admin logon screen of one of my blogs that has login lockdown installed and purposely entered the wrong password.

After 10 attempts (with login lockdown set to block at 3), I tried the right password and it logged on. Not quite right!

So I started investigating what could be wrong with this great little plugin. In the end I was trawling through the code behind the plugin and I was looking through the installation function and there there is a routine to add a new table to the database. Yet, that table does not exist!

Quite a simple job then to manually create the table. But it is worth while testing the lockdown is working on your blog. But just do not test it just before you need to logon! Try it out at a time when you can leave it for a while, or reduce the logout time before you test it. Or just clear out your login_fails table to reset it.

Here’s the SQL you need to run to insert the table to your database. Just replace [prefix] with whatever prefix you have given in your config file when you installed WordPress. Once this table is added, it works. However, I am still testing to see if it works quite as well as it is supposed to…

CREATE TABLE [prefix]login_fails (
`login_attempt_ID` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`user_id` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
`login_attempt_date` datetime NOT NULL default ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′,
`login_attempt_IP` varchar(100) NOT NULL default ”,
PRIMARY KEY (`login_attempt_ID`) );