@jawsmith wrote:
Hi xrev, John_Delay,
this forum topic has become a community effort, not one majorly by the Piwik team. (Thanks to the Piwik team for the great work, btw.!)
Although I don't know why you would like to block general access to “index.php”, as that would break access to the user interface of Piwik, my guess is that you are missing the concept of “regular expressions” in an Apache htaccess file. A quick googling for “apache htaccess regular expressions” brings up a good description of them in http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/4332.htm (or http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/intro.html#regex if you use “mod_rewrite”, which you don't seem to).
I.e., your “?”, etc., are interpreted as regular expressions. If you need them to be interpreted literally, you would need to “escape” them by placing the “escape” character “\” (backslash) before each regular expression character.
Hope this helps.