Here's what I know so far....
The error message is sent by the mod_security which is a Firewall app used by Apache which is the software that is used by our webhosting company, HostGator. They call it a "client-based" error because mod_security looks at the request made by a client (browser) to load a page or perform some function and if it finds anything that looks like hacking, it says that the request made by the client is "not acceptable." The problem is that it sometimes thinks that perfectly normal things look suspicious. Many websites have evidently had problems with random, mysterious objections from mod_security that are hard to track down.
Since I was not getting this message myself, it was hard for me to figure out what exactly mod_security was objecting to. The tech at HostGator added some code to my .htaccess file that was supposed to fix it, but it did not.
Then I got the message myself, but only when I clicked on the "Forum" link on the menu bar. If I went directly to the forum from my bookmark, it worked fine. So I switched the URL on the menubar to the same URL I had bookmarked... from
www.oakridgeoutlaws.org/forum to
http://www.oakridgeoutlaws.org/forum/index.php?wwwRedirect. This fixed the problem for me and I never saw the message again. Unfortunately, it did not seem to work for everyone.
Sheriff Langston - Here is the explanation of wwwRedirect:
https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/WwwRedirect Its not anything bad. SMF (Simple Machines) is the software I use to run the forum.
I talked to another tech at HostGator and they basically said, "Don't know why there is a problem."
What makes this difficult is that a) I cannot reproduce these errors myself and b) from your reports, they seem to show up at various times, doing different tasks, but not consistently. There is the option of asking HostGator to disable mod_security completely for our website, but I'd rather not do that.
If those of you having this problem could tell me what link you clicked or specific address you tried to go to that causes the problem, maybe I could find some pattern. Send me an email at anita_margarita@ymail.com, if you wish. I will continue to try to track this down. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience.
AM
