Today we are making a systems change that affects collections hosted under /public/html and visible to the public at https://www.ibiblio.org and http://www.ibiblio.org.
This change should not meaningfully affect the vast majority of collections. We are changing the default behavior. Whereas in the past, any directory, such as /public/html/example, which did not have an index.html or index.php file, would show its contents in an automatically-generated directory listing, starting today accessing that directory will show an error. We are making this change because an increasing number of security incidents involve malicious actors abusing abandoned or unmaintained collections, and denying directory browsing dramatically ups the cost of finding such potential points of abuse.
If your collection has directories intended for public access that do not have index.html or index.php files, and you are depending on the current default directory listing behavior, you have several options for moving forward. The simplest option is to explicitly enable the directory listing behavior with a .htaccess file directive like so:
Options +Indexes
Another option is to create an index.php file which generates a directory listing. This second option has some benefits, including the ability to add headers and footers appropriate to your collection, or the ability to add useful metadata for different kinds of entries.
If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to us by replying below.