Debian Kernal Upgrade Killed My Rewrites

I am posting here because I know from experience there are seriously knowledgeable people and...

1) my ISP tech support sucks (1and1) and yes I should change ISPs.. when I have time which unfortunately is not right now.


2) The tech support on the mods that are broken [update: fixed it]!!!!


ANYWAY, the problem...

Last week my ISP upgraded to the latest Debian OS.

After some initial polish, I noticed some other problems....

1) My Zoints tagging mod for vbulleting no longer works. When you click on a tag in the tagcloud, rather than go to the tag index page, it now gets punted to the forum index page.

2) Zoints profile does the same thing.

3) I thought If I deactivated vbseo, which I did, I would get a 404. But instead it still gets punted to the forum index? Isn't that strange?


I assume this is a rewrite issue, because my ISP had added this line to my .htaccess to get some other things to work:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !forums/

I am not sure what this does.

However when I tried the same code with !tags that didn't work.

Worse, I don't have access to httpd or php logs as this is a 'managed' server and I don't have root access.

So I am blind.

Again, Zoints and my ISP are unhelpful so I am coming back to my friends here because of your level of expertise and help in the past. I am really upset and without the tags, seeing my Alexia Rank go down in less than a week.

ANY SUGGESTIONS would be appreciated.

Thank you,

matt
3reef.com

Hello,

Does it work correctly if you temporarily remove .htaccess file?

Interesting question. I will try that late tonight. Thanks Oleg.

Someone at my ISP said I will have access to httpd logs tomorrow which I think will be helpful in this case - if they are to be believed.

I will report back. Any further suggestions are welcome!

Ok. I couldn't wait.

When I removed the .htaccess I got this error when I clicked on a tag in the tag cloud:

Error 404 - Not found

Your browser can't find the document corresponding to the URL you typed in.

What is an example of tag URL? I suppose you need another .htaccess file in tags/ folder to handle them.

Oleg it's fixed!

I would like to publicly retract my negative comments about Zoints' support.

Reid at Zoints stuck with it and figured it out!

The following line was needed in the .htaccess of the tags dir:
RewriteBase /forums/tags

I can't tell you why this is needed after upgrading Debian. Perhaps you can?

Anyway, the Zoints Tag mod is superior to the last version of the vb tags and I highly recommend it.

My traffic was cut in half during this downtime.



matt