We used Artio Joomsef on the relaunch of our Joomla website. Since going live on Joomla 2.5 (now running Artio Joomsef v 4.2.8), we've noticed that occasionally there are issues that appear on the site's URLs. The issue only appears for 5 to 10 minutes at a time and then disappears. It seems to happend one or two times per day, but could be happening more and we just don't know it.

The issue has to do with random URL prefixes/subdomains (that do not exist) randomly appearing. I've attached a screenshot of what I'm talking about. Each time the issue occurs, it is always a different prefix that appears. We have seen the following prefixes appear: www.wwww., www.banks., www.www., www.xnqijpuk. (random letters - such as the attachment).

As I mentioned, this issue appears and then disappears randomly on its own. We've spoken to both the hosting company and our web developers and they both seem to think this is an issue with how Joomsef is configured/installed.

Please review and provide feedback so we can resolve this issue. (Note: we have blurred out the main domain url from the screenshot for privacy purposes). If you need more information, please send us an email directly.

Hello,
We haven't encountered such problem yet. How exactly does this happen? You say that it happens for eg. 5 minutes and then it disappears. Does it mean that for that 5 minutes all URLs on the website have this prefix? Or is there only one specific URL affected? Or some random URLs?
Is the prefix visible in your web browser's status bar when you hover the links on your website, or the URL looks ok until you click it and then the prefix gets added to URL in address bar (ie. correct URL is redirected to URL with prefix)?
Do you have caching enabled in Joomla? If you do, try disabling it for few days to see if it helps - we've seen some strange things on some servers with SEF (and not just JoomSEF, even Joomla's own SEF) when caching was enabled.

Hi - thanks for the response. Please see below for answers to your questions:

How exactly does this happen? You say that it happens for eg. 5 minutes and then it disappears. Does it mean that for that 5 minutes all URLs on the website have this prefix? Answer: Yes, this appear for about 5 to 15 minutes and then disappears. For the duration of the issue, all URLs have the prefix. For example, I just checked it earlier today and all URL previews were showing www.ww instead of normal www. This issue is no longer visible on the site now.


Or is there only one specific URL affected? Or some random URLs? Answer: All URLs on our main site display the same prefix issue when affected.


Is the prefix visible in your web browser's status bar when you hover the links on your website, or the URL looks ok until you click it and then the prefix gets added to URL in address bar (ie. correct URL is redirected to URL with prefix)? Answer: The web browser's status bar shows the WRONG URL when I hover over it. Then, when I click on it, it redirects to correct (non-prefixed) URL; however, this is because we've manually set up a redirect so that the address bar is not showing weird URLs. Before setting up the redirect, the address bar too was affected by this weird prefix issue.


Do you have caching enabled in Joomla? If you do, try disabling it for few days to see if it helps - we've seen some strange things on some servers with SEF (and not just JoomSEF, even Joomla's own SEF) when caching was enabled. Answer: We've been using Joomla's cache. We can try to disable it, but what good does that do? We need the cache so that the site loads quickly. Do you want us to disable it for testing to help provide you with more feedback? Thanks,

Hi, I honestly don't know what could cause this issue, but I don't think JoomSEF is causing this. If it was something with JoomSEF's configuration, it wouldn't appear and disappear randomly.
I think the best way to find out what is causing this would be if you could replicate your live server (files and database) and run it in some subdomain for testing, so you could try disabling only cache, only JoomSEF or both at once to see if the problem disappears with some setup.