Hi,

Don't take this as gospel, but I'm fairly sure that .htaccess is optional. However pretty URLs won't work without it, and all your URLs will be different to what they were.

Firstly see if you can access the dashboard viawww.www.domain.com/index.php/dashboard...

Once in the dashboard, turn off pretty urls and see if the site works. Then turn pretty URLs back on, and reinstate the .htaccess file with the provided code.

More importantly though, you need to find out how the hack happened. It's a good idea to lock down the write permissions as far as you can - most files/folders should be 755, there will be supporting docs for how this should be setup. There's a lot more you need to do to find out how the hacker got in and securing things properly, but that's more than I can advise in a forum post.

One further thing to note is that some browsers cache 301 redirects (firefox) so sometimes you will need to clear the cache or use a fresh browser after fixing the problem.

So I turned off pretty url's and no the site doesn't work. Of course now I can't get back in to turn them on. I'll try to edit the .htaccess file. I'm not sure how to turn it on otherwise since I'm getting a 500 error now when I try to access the dashboard.

Nice I got back in! I'll let ya know if it works! thanks so much!!