500 internal server error

Help!!

Everything was working fine but I needed to increase my max post size and max file upload size. I did that, saved - forum working normally. Went back in a minute later to tweak the sizes but when I hit save this time, bang, 500 error. It's been that way since. I made no changes to .htaccess prior to entering PHP configuration. Config.php was also untouched.

Two reboots had no effect. If I load the default vbseo htaccess and then try my forum url I see my custom 404 page.

I get the following error in my error log:

.......public_html/.htaccess: RewriteRule: bad flag delimiters

That is indicating that something is wrong with my htaccess but I didn't touch that before, during or after amending php.ini so what the heck could be wrong? I've tried commenting out lines in htaccess, I even fed the server a blank one - no change and the 500 persists. The redirects are not being respected and it's like htaccess is invisible.

Can anyone help me with some tips on what to look at next please? Desperate here as the forum has been offline for three hours already...


Here's my htaccess:


(removed after problem solved below)

Kept testing this and it looks like the server had a fit and broke php.ini. There's something wrong with the vbet rules too. Don't understand how changing a setting in php.ini could cause so much havoc but I'm back up. Just need to fix the vbet rules now.

Fixed php.ini and loaded a saved copy of the vbet htaccess I should have been using in the first place. All back to normal

glad you got this figured out. do you know what setting it was?

I looked into this a little more after things calmed down and actually I think php.ini was okay all along Brian. At the time and trying to work fast to get the forum back up for my members I wasn't working logically. Seeing the 500 immediately after saving php.ini initially pointed the finger at that as being the cause because I couldn't (still can't) get my head around the fact that something happened to my htaccess without me touching it. Reverting to a default PHP config changed nothing so at that point I knew that htaccess was the culprit and started looking at it.

All is working nicely again now though.