Question

Setting up an .htaccess seems to be difficult for this situation. For a dating site we have this scenario:

We assume john is logged in:

domain.com/john //this works no problem

domain.com/?askout=yes&when=later //this doesn't work, if john is logged in and pastes 
                                    this url, it automatically redirects to domain.com/john
                                    instead, htaccess should see the ? and know it's
                                    not a valid user. It should keep the entire query,
                                    and redirect to /profiles.php?askout=yes&when=later

Here is the .htaccess:

RewriteRule ^(\w+)/?$ ./profiles.php?username=$1

Basically, I need to have .htaccess know that an immediate ? means not to use the above rewrite rule. Any idea how to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Try:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} askout=yes&when=later
RewriteRule ^ /profiles.php?askout=yes&when=later [L]

This rule needs to go before the rule you have redirecting to the ?username target.