jdMorgan - 12:57 am on Oct 6, 2002 (gmt 0)

Annii,

I'm glad you got it working too - I was away from WebmasterWorld today. But, as you found out, there's a lot of knowledge here among many members, and now you too are an experienced htaccess debugger!

carfac's comment on your rewrite rule above is correct: The rule's pattern (on the left) uses only a path, and the substitution (on the right) uses either a canonical URL (http://www.mydomain.com/substitutefile.html) or a path (/substitutefile.html). So as carfac said, the rule must read:

RewriteRule !^403.htm$ - [F,L]

mod_rewrite is like nitroglycerin - Very powerful, but don't drop it! One little typo can blow the whole thing up - a fact I was personally reminded of just two hours ago when I found I'd inadvertently introduced a syntax error into my spambot block RewriteRules, and essentially disabled the whole lot!

Jim