Every article has a dynamic link back to the contributors profile so i
hacked every mention of "/users.php?mode=profile&uid=useridnumber"
into
/userprofile/useridnumber.html
Then created a new folder called userprofile and then created a .htaccess document in this new folder.
the Mod_Rewrite rules in this doc are:
RewriteBase /userprofile/
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /users.php?mode=profile&uid=$1 [NC,L]