I wanted to blame Really Simple SSL, but it was someone else!

  • Resolved AndrogenicAlopecia

    (@androgenicalopecia)


    5 years, 11 months ago

    Several days ago, my traffic went down by 40 percent. Then I found that while my website loaded ok if you directly typed in the URL, it no longer loaded when you found it inside Google search results. In that case, when you clicked on my site via the Google search results, there was an error message of unlimited redirects/looping. It never loaded.

    I then saw that the Really Simple SSL plugin was not updated in the past few days so some other plugin or culprit messed with my htaccess file (even my domain provider’s technical support initially suspected it could be Really Simple SSL messing the htaccess file, when it was not)!

    Anyway, I found the following lines of code on top of my htaccess file:

    RewriteEngine On

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (google|yahoo|msn|aol|bing) [OR]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (google|yahoo|msn|aol|bing)
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ differentiation-dissatisfaction.php?$1 [L]

    # BEGIN rlrssslReallySimpleSSL rsssl_version[3.1.5]:
    …..

    I redid a new htaccess file, but I assume I could have deleted the above 4 lines before the #BEGIN line and been ok too?

    How did those 4 lines get in there!?!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Mark

    (@markwolters)

    Hi,

    that’s strange, the code at the top of your .htaccess file redirects traffic from certain search engines to the differentiation-dissatisfaction.php file. This is definitely not added by Really Simple SSL. I cannot tell for sure how it got there, it could be added by another plugin or manually by someone with access to your server. I’d suggest to contact your hosting provider about this, they are able to check what the file differentiation-dissatisfaction.php actually does and when it got added to your .htaccess file.

    Mark

    Thread Starter AndrogenicAlopecia

    (@androgenicalopecia)

    Thanks yes definitely not added by you guys was my point since you did not update Plugin in past 2-3 days when that code was added and reduced my traffic by 40 percent!

    By the way, do you guys modify any other files besides the htaccess?

    Can other plugins modify any other files besides htaccess? That would be very concerning.

    Plugin Author Mark

    (@markwolters)

    Usually the .htaccess file is the only file modified by Really Simple SSL when the 301 .htaccess redirect is enabled. If the server uses a load balancer, the plugin also writes some lines of code to the wp-config.php file. Besides those two the plugin doesn’t modify any other files.

    Other plugins can also modify the .htaccess file and/or any other files by using one of PHP’s built-in functions, for example file_get_contents() and file_put_contents(), among others. Your hosting provider can likely provide you with more information about how and why this has happened.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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