htaccess ratsnest

[ids]

I am working on an old MMUI store. Any thoughts on why someone might write the session id to the htaccess file in a redirect instruction?

Secondly, the set of instructions is nearly 300 lines. I know this can be problematic but I don't recall details as to what can lead to the potential problems.

Thanks,

Scott

[lesliekirk]

Thinking out loud here. They may have done this because they had hardcoded a Session ID in at one time and the search engines picked it up. Links with Session ID are not desirable links to list so to get the bots to find the correct link they did this. LOL, this is my second "WAG" of the day.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

htaccess in general can lead to problems; rewrites require that all requests be passed to Apache, not satisfied by nginx, and then Apache has to analyze every rewrite rule against every request, until it finds a match which also has a 'last' flag, or no match. So just one page load of a site with ~50 resources on the page, such as images, would mean a htaccess with 300 rules could require apache to do as many as 300 * 50 string comparisons just to answer a single page request. This increases time to first byte, overall page delivery time, server load, etc.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

RE: Session IDs. Actually Leslie's idea might be more logical, but perhaps they where trying to test something and wanted to constrain it to a specific person...and just forgot to remove it.

[ids]

Thanks David. That is actually more info than I might have known. :)

Scott