RewriteRule: bad flag delimiters – MUUT forum 500 error

[ED Klyne]

When I activate the muut forum my site crashes, I can open the .htaccess file and edit out info about muut but when I login again it is reentered and now I have deactivated the forum. The error message is…
Server error!
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.
Error message:
/services/users/zstorage11p2/xxxxxx/www/xxxxxx.xxx/blog/.htaccess: RewriteRule: bad flag delimiters

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster
Error 500
http://www.faithalone.info/
Sat Jan 10 01:33:14 2015
Apache mod_fcgid/2.3.7 mod_auth_pgsql/2.0.3</address>

[ED Klyne]

There is nothing logged and I have tried disabling wp-admin .htaccess and I still get error and have to edit .htaccess from control panel to gain access.

[AITpro Admin]

A 500 error will not be logged since this basically means your website/server has crashed.

htaccess flags are the characters in the square brackets:  [F], [L], etc.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20890004/rewriterule-error-bad-flag-delimiters

And the RewriteRule: bad flag delimiters error message is a bit generic and could also focus more on a bad “delimiter” vs a bad flag character.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23163536/rewriterule-bad-flag-delimiters

So what the error is telling you is that you have have some bad/invalid htaccess code somewhere. So what you want to look at is all of your RewriteRules specifically for any code that is not valid.

[ED Klyne]

OK, I contacted the muut forum and Paul told me that I had to use the slug as the name of the forum. I was using the name and that set up flags. His response was -> “I had thought we had validation set up so that bad values couldn’t be saved (and break the .htaccess), and we did… except…”

It is now working and, oh yes, BPS is back up and protecting my site.

Thanks for your help.

[Author]

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