SysAdmin Adventures

Have you just updated your WordPress.com Stats plugin? Does your stats page no longer show the graph? Would you like to know why?

The reason is because the plugin now includes a .htaccess file (/plugins/stats/.htaccess) and the .htaccess file contains:

By default, in a reasonably secure setup, the .htaccess file does not have permission to specify an Allow directive. This really shouldn’t be a problem as it should just be ignored, but it seems that for some reason, the fact that the directive is not allowed causes apache to actively deny access instead even though it would work perfectly if the .htaccess file weren’t there at all. I don’t know why, it just does.

One solution would be to delete the .htaccess file, but I prefer not to adjust the plugin as a simple adjustment to the apache configuration will solve the problem. Apache needs to be told to allow the .htaccess file to specify an Allow directive using the AllowOverride directive in the main configuration.

Those who have implemented Permalinks will already have included:

All you need to do is extend it to include Limit as well:

You could achieve the same result with:

I heavily recommend against it as it has the potential to be a security threat.