lucy24 - 7:19 am on Jul 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

Is there any possibility of humans following these outdated links, or is this strictly for search engines? For humans, the 410 is definitely a last resort; you'd really like them to land somewhere. If the page still exists in query-free form, just chop off the query string and let people land on the "base" page.

But for search engines, if it's a choice between returning a 410 and redirecting a bunch of different urls to the same place, go with the, er, Gone. In mod_rewrite they are set up exactly like [F]:

RewriteRule {any old stuff here} - [G]

Since you're applying it to everything that has a particular query string, you don't need to have anything in particular in the rule. Maybe \.php$ to be tidy about it.

In the %{QUERY_STRING} part, if you want to exclude everything that contains the com_dtregister element, and you're not capturing the rest, you don't need the
^([^&]*;)*option=
part. (Hm. Seems to be a rash of unwanted smileys lately. One way to keep them out is to wrap everything in "code" tags ;)) Just write out the part of the query string that you do want to look for.