Ok, so this problem recently arose and I don't know why it is happening; it's actually two problems in one...
0. My .htaccess file, for reference.
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
ErrorDocument 400 /index.php?400
ErrorDocument 401 /index.php?401
ErrorDocument 403 /index.php?403
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?404
ErrorDocument 410 /index.php?410
ErrorDocument 414 /index.php?414
ErrorDocument 500 /global/500.php
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$ [NC]
RewriteRule !^(ajax) index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https?://(.*\.)?(animuson)\.(biz|com|info|me|net|org|us|ws)/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F]
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>
1. My 'pictures' folder is following the hard path instead of the redirect.
I have no idea WHY it is doing this. It's really bugging me. The 'pictures' folder is a symbolic link to another place so that I can easily upload files to that folder without having to search through folders and such via my FTP account, but that's the only thing I use it for. However, when I visit http://example.com/pictures my htaccess sees it as accessing that other folder, which is restricted, and throws a 403 error rather than redirecting to index.php and displaying the page like normal.
I figured it has something to do with that specific folder being a symbolic link causing it to act oddly, but I have determined that my rules are not being applied to folders at all. If I visit folders such as 'css' and 'com' which are folders in the web root, it displays a 404 error page and adds the '/' to the end of the URL because it's treating it as a directory. It also does the same 403 error for my 'images' directory which is set up in the same fashion.
So, the question here is how do I modify my RewriteRule to apply to the directories as well? I want everything accessed via the web to be redirected back to index.php while maintaining the full access path in the address bar, why is it not working? (I'm pretty sure it was working fine before.)
Here's a small chart to show the paths they're following...
example.com/pictures -> pictures/ -> /home/animuson/animuson-pictures -> 403
example.com/com -> com/ -> 404
example.com/test -> index.php
example.com/ -> index.php
example.com/images -> images/ -> /home/animuson/animuson-images -> 403
example.com/css -> css/ -> 404
2. Why is my compression not working?
When analyzing my site through a web optimizer, it keeps saying my page isn't using web compression, but I'm almost 100% positive that it was working fine before under the same settings. Can anyone suggest any reasons why it might not be working with this set up or suggest a better way of doing it?