I recommended Moodle to a buddy. He needs a new host anyway, so he is adding compatability to moodle on his shopping list. He had me look at a host's php settings (that he was interested in) and I compared their settings to this list, taken from the forums (I got their settings from a phpinfo() file set up by their support people):
magic_quotes_gpc On
magic_quotes_runtime Off
file_uploads On
short_open_tag On
session.auto_start Off
session.bug_compat_warn Off
Everything is ok except the last one, it is set to "On".
I've been around this mountain before when I set Moodle up on my server except it was the magic_quotes_gpc setting that wasn't right. I tried htaccess changes, went back and forth with the host, and finally got a different host and Moodle works fine.
This is a different setting, so how crucial is this setting? Will it crash the script? Can we depend on a htaccess workaround? (oops, I didn't ask the host if they're Unix or Apache or what?)