RewriteRule To A Subfolder

[vbplusme]

Hello and Greetings.

I have just discovered that Google Webmaster Tools has listed a couple of hundred 404s when they index my site. The are all socalled "SEO Friendly" URLs that were generated by a hack that I removed from my site. The URLs looks like:

hxxp://www.mysite.com/forums/all-database-related-issues/

I had this problem with another site and fixed it with :

RewriteRule ^all-database-related-issues/?$ http://www.mysite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=47 [L,R=301]

But that site was running in the root folder and the one I am trying fix now is running in a /forums folder. I have tried every combination of "/forums" in that RewriteRule and have found one that works yet.

Anybody done this successfully?

TIA



Edit:

In case you need to do this, here is what I found out:

If the rule is going in a .htaccess file in the /forums/ folder, then use the exact same rule as though your forum is installed in the root (zero changes to the pattern), because URL paths as seen by "RewriteRule" are localised to the folder where the .htaccess file is located. The example above is the correct syntax if the .htaccess file is in the /forums folder. The reason it did not work is that the .htaccess file was missing the "RewriteEngine On directive" at the top of the file to enable it.

I wasted a LOT of time on this silly mistake so I hope this helps someone with a similar problem.