It seems our custom rewrite rules are not inserted into your .htaccess file properly. There are a few reasons for this:
- You edit and mess up your .htaccess rules
Please enable "remote debug log" and validate your .htaccess rules under our settings, ‘Helpers” tab - Your WordPress folders are structured differently from usual
For example, your domain’s root folder is located at, let's say, home/ directory but your WordPress files are put under home/wp/ directory. In such cases, our plugin can't insert our .htaccess codes properly, and so, you have to manually update your .htaccess located at home/wp/ directory with our plugin's custom rewrite rules.
The error message is descriptive, isn’t it?
If your .htaccess file were writable, we could insert our codes automatically for you, but it isn’t.So you must either make your .htaccess file writable (with 644 permission) or manually put the mod_rewrite rules found under Settings > Permalinks (you can find the code below) into your .htaccess file.
First, Prevent Direct Access supports Apache HTTP Server (“httpd”), which has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996.
Please note that although our plugin (both Free & Premium version) does support websites hosted on WP Engine who utilizes NGINX web server, you need to manually configure some htaccess redirect rules.
Second, the plugin also needs to flush some mod_rewrite rules to your website’s .htaccess file to prevents direct access to your files on the server.
As mentioned, in order for the plugin to work properly, you must either make the .htaccess file (located on your website root folder) writable or manually update our mod_rewrite rules to your .htaccess.
By default, if you deactivate and remove our plugin via WordPress, our .htaccess rule will be removed together with its files. However, in case you remove it manually using FTP, you will have to remove these codes from your .htaccess for your Media files & images to work normally.
# Prevent Direct Access Rewrite Rules version 3.0 and above
RewriteRule ^private/([a-zA-Z0-9-_]+)$ index.php?pda_v3_pf=$1&pdav3_rexypo=ymerexy [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !facebookexternalhit/[0-9]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Twitterbot/[0-9]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot/[0-9]
RewriteRule ^wp-content/uploads(/_pda/.*\.\w+)$ index.php?pda_v3_pf=$1 [QSA,L]
# Prevent Direct Access Rewrite Rules End
# Prevent Direct Access Rewrite Rules version 2.0 and below
RewriteRule private/([a-zA-Z0-9-_]+)$ index.php?pre_dir_acc_61co625547=$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s
RewriteRule wp-content/uploads(/[A-Za-z0-9_@./#&+-]+)+\.([A-Za-z0-9_@./#&+-]+)$ index.php?pre_dir_acc_61co625547=$1&is_direct_access=true&file_type=$2 [QSA,L]
That is a rare browser issue that we couldn't completely reproduce on our side. Basically, your license somehow couldn't be submitted successfully.
If you happen to face this issue, please try to activate our license on another browser such as Firefox and Safari.
