WordPress Issue Due to htaccess Misconfiguration

Had several issues on this site and most of my smaller sites that were traced back to a misconfiguration of my .htaccess file which most likely was caused by a WordPress plugin that updated it.

The error I saw in my errors file for Apache was Either all Options must start with + or -, or no Option may [closed]

In digging through my .htaccess file I found this line:

Options ExecCGI Includes IncludesNOEXEC SymLinksIfOwnerMatch -Indexes

And this was the line barfing, it said basically every OPTIONS has to have +, – in front or none of them can.

This must be something different with later Apache release or something as this file was untouched for months, but either way it was a simple fix.  Just moving Options -Indexes to a separate line without it being part of the same line resolved the problem and I was able to have the issue resolved.

Meanwhile, I had some issues with PHP and ION Cube Loader which is required for my Author hReview plugin so I had to have that setup which require a support ticket to InMotion hosting as they don’t allow you to check the module in PHP Configuration, but they were fairly quick to just load the Option and get this site back up and running again.

Overall I haven’t found the reason for the change, but suspect it may be related to Wordfence Security plugin which occasionally can update the .htaccess file I think, this seems like something the plugin would do and it was recently updated though I can’t prove it caused the issue.