It all comes to fact that how many forums have really old posts that are linked from external websites... As the directory structure was changed around 2.5, all older links have to be rewritten in Apache at least once. If I figured it out correctly, Apache really does choke on semicolon during rewrite unless the query string validity check is explicitly disabled using NE (NoEscape). What comes to issue with "+" sign it is more about strict standards compliance, where actual script have to check validity of query parameter using both space and plus sign as full URL encoding of query string is optional, and not mandatory. Clients are actually permitted to URL decode safe characters on all links on pages and return the link to server in plain US ASCII.

Dandello wrote on Sep 19^th, 2014 at 1:45pm:


Well... For converting forums from maybe pre-2.5 YaBB, it is something that helps to reduce "false" 404 errors in Apache error log... I haven't yet figured out how to "permanently" fix all the regex in .htaccess to work correctly as Attachments still require two rewrites...

This is the basic idea:

 RewriteRule ^yabb\/Attachments\/(.*) "\/yabbfiles\/Attachments\/$1"
 RewriteRule ^yabb\/(.*) "\/cgi-bin\/yabb2\/$1" [R=301,NE,L]
  

I stripped out the host part of the rewrite target, which forces the redirect to be external, so it does update the crawler cache with new URL.

We also have to figure out how to keep Guardian from trashing those settings.
Make sure Guardian doesn't trash those settings.

What irks me is that when you're looking up directions on how to do something in .htaccess most of the instructions read like an old grimoire - if you don't know most of the answer already you can't figure out what the heck their solution is about. (But then a lot of Perl advice is the same way.)