I apologize for any trouble anyone might have had today trying to get to something in the archives. My permalinks have suddenly stopped working, and I have no idea why.
I have had them set up as follows: /archives/%postname%/ almost since I began the blog in January, and they have worked fine. I was barely even in the WP Admin this weekend and haven’t done a thing in ages except write posts and manage comments (no new plugins, upgrades, etc.), and suddenly I get the system 404 (not the 404 page from my template) when clicking on any permalink. I tried changing them to the default, and they work fine, and then changed them to date and name based and that works fine as well, but any permalink structure that begins with /archive/ returns a 404. I tried deleting the htaccess and changing them again, but that did not help.
I talked to my host and their only suggestion was to set the site back to the backup version from Saturday, since I really think they were working then. I appreciated John letting me know about this, by the way. I would have been blissfully unaware until at least Monday.
Is there anyone who knows more about this kind of thing than me who might have a suggestion?