Why do I get a notice saying my license key is no longer valid and was deactivated?

Sometimes, you may see a notice that says:

The license “l1M5-{random-alpha-numeric-string}” is no longer valid and was deactivated. Please visit your account dashboard at https://lifterlms.com/my-account for more information.

When you head to your account, the license key is actually active and valid and nothing seems to be out of place.

LifterLMS validates your license keys with LifterLMS.com’s servers regularly to make sure that it is up-to-date. This requires communication between your site and LifterLMS.com.

Due to various reasons, this communication may fail from time to time, in which case, this is the notice displayed to you because as far as LifterLMS is concerned, the validation simply failed.

(Obviously, if your license has actually expired, you wouldn’t be reading this document!)

Sometimes, your server may block such communication for various reasons. Some hosts would consider such frequent communication suspicious and simply block it. Other times, a firewall or a security policy may prevent communication with LifterLMS.com’s servers because it isn’t whitelisted (unlike popular Payment Gateways and other third party services like, say MailChimp).

Very rarely your site may be blocked by LifterLMS.com’s firewalls because our security software has blacklisted your server’s IP address because of past suspicious activity.

Most of the times, such communication breakdown is one-off or temporary and it is safe to ignore this completely.

Since LifterLMS and its addons are all open source and GPL licensed, failure of license validation does not affect the functionality or performance of your site in any way. Everything will work exactly as it should and nothing will break or stop working.

If you have a valid license, your ability to get support from the LifterLMS team doesn’t get affected. What it does affect is the ability to get the latest updates.

Even if all the measures to resolve this fail, in the worst case scenario, you can still download the latest versions of your addons from https://lifterlms.com/my-account and update them manually.

So, there’s no need to panic or worry about this. Simply try the steps mentioned in the next section.

1. First of all, you should login into https://lifterlms.com/my-account/ and check if your license is indeed still active and valid.
2. If the license is valid, this error will usually resolve itself the next time the validation takes place. So, in most cases, you can simply ignore it.
3. In close to 100% of such cases, the issue would have resolved by the time you reach this step. Rarely, because our security has blacklisted your server, the issue will continue. If that’s what’s happening with you, get in touch with LifterLMS support.
4. In the worst case scenario, if your site is on a blacklisted server, your hosts will help switch you to a different IP address. So, there’s really nothing to worry about!