Wordpress 2.1 403 Forbidden Error During Post

After successfully upgrading to Wordpress 2.1, the first problem I encountered was trying to save the previous post. I was halfway through the post. I noticed that the autosave function seemed to work without problems, but when I tried to save the post manually, this little fella popped up:

Now, after using Wordpress for almost 2 years, I’ve found Wordpress to be a little temperamental. As a Wordpress blogger, you’ve got to expect glitches and errors now and then, which is why I always advocate keeping a copy of your original Wordpress folder. If all else fails, you can always revert to it.

Back to the problem at hand. I did a couple of searches to see what this problem was and found out that it most likely had to do with web hosts who have mod_security running on their servers. This is a setting that your web host has control over. Apparently, the people who have encountered this problem mentioned that their posts were a bit long, which was also my case. It was also mentioned that certain words in your post could trigger this error. That seemed a bit silly, but there were a couple of things I could do see if I could get around the problem :

• I checked the server’s file and folder permission settings. If your FTP program allows you to do so, you can easily check this by selecting the folder and viewing its “Properties/CHMOD” settings. Your folders should be set to 755 and your files set to 644 permission. My files and folders were in the correct permission setting so that was again a no-go.
• Next, I created a new post, keyed in three words and saved the post. Success, so the problem wasn’t really that the server was blocking ALL posts.
• To check if it was the length of the post that was causing the problem, I copied one of my previous posts 5 times (to make it a post that was approx 500 lines). No problems.
• I left this step to the last because it was the most tedious. Starting a new post, I cut and pasted the post one paragraph at a time. There were no problems until halfway through. I notice one word that could possibly be the culprit and tested it. And the word that triggered the error in this case? It was the robots-dot-text file . The only way I could get around this was to key in “ROBOTS text file”! See… I had to do it again in the line above because it was giving me the error again! I will need to contact my web host and find a solution to this. I can’t be avoiding the word robots-dot-text file as a blogger!

So if you get this error the next time you try to save a post, you won’t freak out! If all else fails, remember your web host is just one phone call away.

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