Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

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trusting
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Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by trusting » Fri Jan 27, 2012 10:16 pm

Running Joomla 1.7.3 on Linux.

After watching a video on what's new in Joomla 1.7 yesterday, I decided to use the Redirect component to set a link for a PDF on our site. (Still haven't accomplished that.)

I opened the component and found a bunch of old links, useless links and began deleting them, pages of them. Then I noticed that they were all JEvents links. That's odd because I'm not using JEvents on this site! The 1.5 version did use JEvents. (I used SPUpgrade to convert.) However, I didn't install JEvents on the new 1.7 site. (We switched to a registration component instead.)

I continued deleting, but it was going very slowly. I decided to switch the number of links listed to "all" so I could just get it done. That produced an error message. (Sorry I don't recall the exact message; it was a white page with just a couple lines of text and there was something about too much data or lack of memory/resources.) With the component now set to show "all" redirect links, it could not show the admin redirect component because the volume was more than the system could handle. I could go to other parts of the admin, but redirect component always resulted in an error.

Using PHPAdmin, I was able to delete the links a couple thousand at a time - all 95,000+ of them!

So now I'm able to get back into the Redirect component and have reset it to only show 100 links at a time.

I double-checked (admin console + FTP files) to make sure that JEvents is not installed. It is not. (Full disclosure: I had the old 1.5 site residing in a folder in the root folder. It does have JEvents in it, but Joomla 1.7 shouldn't be accessing that, right? The folder was named "15", but I've renamed it to "15-old" to prevent any confusion with IDs on the 1.7 site. I've since moved it out of the public_html folder.)

Global cache is OFF. Turned the redirect plugin off.

Wanting to find where the problem was, I turned the Redirect plugin on again, viewed the site, checked the component again and found ... over 100 links! All of them are for JEvents.

Here are a few samples:
component/jevents/day.listevents/2011/02/04/index.php?option=com_jevents&task=month.calendar&catids=4&month=07&year=2012&Itemid=0

component/jevents/day.listevents/2011/02/05/index.php?option=com_jevents&task=month.calendar&month=01&year=2013&Itemid=0

component/jevents/day.listevents/2007/06/07/4

http://www.(sitename here)/component/jevents/day.listevents/2013/03/09/index.php?option=com_jevents&task=month.calendar&month=01&year=2011&Itemid=0

(I'd rather not list the domain in case this is a security issue.)

The last one is especially confusing because when I look at folders via FTP, there is no 'jevents' folder under 'components' in the root folder. ('com_jevents' is not in the root/components folder, either.)

There is no "New URL" or "Referring Page" for any of the current links. The status is "Unpublished." However, when I was deleting from the database, I noticed a few statuses of "-2" and saw one new URL that has nothing to do with our site, certainly not anything I put in there. (Security issue, perhaps?)

Cleared the 100+ links. Cleared browser cache. (Global cache for the site if off.) Did a few page views in the front end, and now there are dozens of new redirect URLs again.

Is this a bug, possibly a security bug (since one redirect link was set to another site)?

Any ideas why these links keep appearing in the redirect list ... where they are coming from?

Teresa

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Re: Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by kenmcd » Sun Feb 05, 2012 2:59 am

trusting wrote: Any ideas why these links keep appearing in the redirect list ... where they are coming from?
Search engines, other websites.
Make sure the links are redirected properly, and the search engines will eventually drop those links.
Put one redirect in the htaccess file for all the Jevents links rather than many redirects in the Redirect component.

.
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Re: Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by trusting » Sun Feb 05, 2012 3:27 am

Thanks, Ken. Can you show me how I would redirect all those Jevents links at once at .htaccess? I'd guess that would be a 301 redirect, but I'm not sure how to write it.

I'll definitely add the redirect to .htaccess, but it has to be something other than search engines causing the problem. When I cleared the redirects, then refreshed the site, and looked at the redirects again, there were several in just seconds; another refresh or page click on the site, and a bunch more redirects. We wouldn't be getting hit by a couple dozen search engines in just a few minutes.

Also, I don't even have JEvents installed on this site. It was installed on the 1.5 precursor, but was never installed on the 1.7 version.

Puzzled ....

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Re: Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by kenmcd » Sun Feb 05, 2012 4:28 am

.
What you do to the website only has an indirect effect on the incoming links.

For example:
This website does not display JEvents on any menus:
http://www.HearingFromGodNow.org

But a search on Google shows many incoming JEvents links are still in their index:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www ... GodNow.org
"About 5,010 results (0.05 seconds)"

And those links appear to work (the ones I tested still worked).
So it would appear JEvents is still installed on that website even though it is not on a menu.
The search engines will not remove links that still work.

.
██ LibreTraining

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Re: Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by khidr » Tue Jan 27, 2015 3:04 pm

Hi,
I have the same problem. How did you manage to delete all the redirects? I still have 80.000 to go and doing that 100 at the time....

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Re: Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by trusting » Tue Jan 27, 2015 3:44 pm

Hi Khidr,

One way to do it fast is to change the Display # (at the bottom of your screen) from "100" to "All." Then select all of them and delete.

A word of caution, though: "All" could take a long time or crash your system. Make sure you have a backup - which is always a good idea before making any serious change. (I use Akeeba.) Too bad there isn't an option to list 1,000 or 10,000 at a time; options just go from 100 to All.

To be honest, I've decided to just ignore them. Not sure if that's wise ... maybe someone else has more insight on that.

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Re: Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by khidr » Tue Jan 27, 2015 4:21 pm

Hi,

I tried to change to all. But yes it crashes the system. Not in a serious way.. I've learned that ignoring them is not a good ideea as it the number will grow rapidly and seriously degrade the performance of your site. Best is to immediately disable the redirect plugin so no new links will be added. There seems to be a way to delete the links using phpadmin. I'm trying to findout more about this..
gert

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Re: Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by trusting » Tue Jan 27, 2015 4:31 pm

Thanks, Gert. That may explain some slow pages.

Just found this and looks like it will do what you need:
http://www.eugenesivokon.com/how-to-pur ... -component

I'm going to turn it off and start cleaning up pages.

Teresa

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Re: Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by khidr » Wed Jan 28, 2015 7:54 am

Hi Teresa,

Here's the answer I recieved from the siteground helpdesk, they very helpfull and knowledgable:
The redirect must indeed be removed using phpmyadmin:
find the table that contains the links and remove the redirects by pressing the Empty button via cPanel -> phpMyAdmin.
good luck

Gert

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Re: Thousands (95,000+!!!) of redirect links

Post by trusting » Wed Jan 28, 2015 10:54 pm

Thanks, Gert! That is a better method. I also turned OFF System-Redirect in the Plugin Manager so it won't keep happening.


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