301 redirect to remove part of url not working

[jewishj]

Hi,

This is a slightly uncommon case, but I basically have a site where there are dedicated profile sections for each user and the three distinct types of users.

So, each user profile page should be accessed by mysite.com/username but people need to be able to go to a url like mysite.com/moderators to see a list of moderators. Something like mysite.com/moderators/username is also valid, but needs to 301 back to the mysite.com/username format.

So, to recap:

mysite.com/moderators -> users.php?type=mods
mysite.com/moderators/username -> mysite.com/username (301)

What i have is:

RewriteRule ^moderators|admins|users/(.+)$ /$1 [L,R=301]

It is failing in two ways:

1. if they go to mysite.com/moderators this rule is triggered - which it shouldn't be since it uses (.+), so if there is no slash followed by one or more characters, it shouldn't match
2. if they go to mysite.com/moderators/username - the rule doesn't pass username, and instead redirects to mysite.com/

Thanks in advance for any help in solving this.

[leslie.jones]

1: You are missing a set of braces by the look of it, so the bareword 'moderator' will match. Try: ^(moderators|admins|users)/(.+)$
2: Fix the above and see what happens.

Hope that helps.

[jewishj]

Thanks, that was my issue. I tried it with square brackets before and it didn't work that way either - I didn't realize I needed the parenthesis.