smakdaddy on "[Plugin: iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)] htaccess causing Internal Server Error 500"

Hey Lwangaman,

Your post is a little long in the tooth but thought i'd reply anyway.

Copy / pasting into the .htaccess file straight from the plugin dashboard doesn't work. You need to clean it up a bit.

I copy/paste into Notepad++ (or similar) first and eyeball it for missing spaces or other weird characters. Remove the double spacing too as that's painful.

In the end there's usually a line or two that butt up against each other which become a bit more obvious in a colour coded text editor.

The block i have in my htaccess (using latest version of ithemes security) looks like this:

# Rules to disable directory browsing
        Options -Indexes

        <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
            RewriteEngine On

            # Rules to protect wp-includes
            RewriteRule ^wp-admin/includes/ - [F]
            RewriteRule !^wp-includes/ - [S=3]
            RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !^(.*)wp-includes/ms-files.php
            RewriteRule ^wp-includes/[^/]+\.php$ - [F]
            RewriteRule ^wp-includes/js/tinymce/langs/.+\.php - [F]
            RewriteRule ^wp-includes/theme-compat/ - [F]

            # Rules to prevent php execution in uploads
            RewriteRule ^(.*)/uploads/(.*).php(.?) - [F] 

            # Rules to block unneeded HTTP methods
            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(TRACE|DELETE|TRACK) [NC]
            RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]

            # Rules to help reduce spam
            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)wp-comments-post\.php*
            RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^(.*).*
            RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://jetpack\.wordpress\.com/jetpack-comment/ [OR]
            RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
            RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]

        </IfModule>

Slightly different, but it works for me.