Question

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

I have a website built in Ruby on Rails. My site has a webpage, located at example.com/communityboard, that you can use to enter a separate Community area (an off-the-shelf bulletin board called bbPress.)

I want users who type in the URL example.com/community to be redirected to example.com/communityboard . It used to work this way, but for some reason, the redirect no longer works in any browser but IE.

We accomplished this redirect by placing an index.html file in the /community folder where bbPress had been installed. The entire code for the index.html file reads

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://example.com/communityboard">

Back when we built the site, I was told that a meta refresh redirect using an index.html file was the best option. The redirect had to address ONLY a single page (http://example.com/community) and not all of the sublevels of the community bb (which lives at http://example.com/community/index.php). Otherwise, the community bb and all of its sublevels would be redirected.

So… my questions:

Why is the meta refresh redirect not working anymore?
How can I fix it?

Thanks again for any help you can offer!

Answer 1

Here’s what happened according to my developer. I don’t fully understand the explanation, so I’m not sure I can answer follow-up questions! “With the old mongrel cluster, Apache would recognize “/community” as a directory, silently forward to “/community/”, which would then pick up the forwarding index.html file. With Phusion Passenger,” which I guess we’re using now, “Apache sends the request directly to Passenger if “/community” is not a regular file, and Passenger was returning the 404 error. As a fix, we’ve disabled passenger in the community folder, which fixes the problem.”