[Paul Schacht]

At https://sunygeneseoenglish.org, the “Blog” link in the left navigation of each group’s home page redirects to the main site’s login page (when logged out) or to the main site’s dashboard (when logged in,  for a user with access to the main site’s dashboard).

The “Blog” link in every group’s left navigation has the form https://sunygeneseoenglish.org/groups/name-of-group/blog/

The blog sites themselves are subdomains: https://name-of-blog.sunygeneseoenglish.org

But the left navigation links should redirect to the subdomain URLs, right?

• This topic was modified 9 months ago by Paul Schacht.
• This topic was modified 9 months ago by Paul Schacht.

[Boone Gorges]

Hi Paul – It’s normal for the href attribute of the links to point to /groups/name-of-group/blog. But once you load that page, you ought to be redirected to the group blog’s home page, ie to name-of-blog.sunygeneseoenglish.org.

A few things to check:

– Go to Dashboard > Network Admin > Settings > GroupBlog Setup > Redirect. Ensure that ‘Redirect Enabled To:’ is set to ‘Home Page’.
– What is the privacy setting for the group blogs in question? Are you testing using a user account that has access to visit the site?

[Paul Schacht]

Thanks for the reply, Boone! Redirect is set as it should be under GroupBlog Setup. I’m seeing this behavior on blogs associated with public groups that anyone can join. A logged in user who’s a member of the group gets directed to the Dashboard of the main site, English @ SUNY Geneseo. Ditto for a logged in user who isn’t a member of the group. A user who isn’t logged in gets redirected to the main site landing page, https://sunygeneseoenglish.org

Any other settings I should look at?

Thanks again,
Paul

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[Boone Gorges]

For reference, here’s where the redirect happens: https://github.com/boonebgorges/bp-groupblog/blob/565b256ede1f2a8c89c480e78b97753d3257afbe/bp-groupblog.php#L1881

I suspect that $blog_id is incorrectly returning 1, and/or get_home_url() is doing something strange.

Have you by any chance updated BP to version 12.0+? You would have to have done this manually, overriding CBOX’s default management of the BuddyPress plugin.

@r-a-y Any thoughts about what might be triggering this redirect behavior? The fact that there *is* a redirect is correct, it’s just that the URL is wrong.

[Paul Schacht]

I’m running BP 11.4.0 and letting CBOX manage my plugins. I’ve sometimes managed them independently in order to stay abreast of updates, but I knew from some of your messages in the GitHub repo that 12 has significant differences, so I’ve held back.

[Ray]

Hi Paul,

I notice that if I attempt to visit a page that doesn’t exist on your site (https://sunygeneseoenglish.org/WHATEVER), the URL will redirect back to the homepage instead of landing on the 404 page. I’m guessing a plugin is causing this behavior, which in turn is affecting the groupblog redirect.

It’s possible that a plugin is responsible for this. Can you list the non-CBOX plugins you are using on your site?

[Paul Schacht]

Hi Ray,

Plugins, in addition to CBOX and its bundled plugins, are

• Akismet
• BP Classic
• Classic Editor
• Collapse-o-Matic
• CommentPress Core
• Markup Markdown
• PDF Embedder
• Post Type Switcher
• WordFence

Thanks,
Paul

• This reply was modified 8 months, 4 weeks ago by Paul Schacht.
• This reply was modified 8 months, 4 weeks ago by Paul Schacht.

[Ray]

Hi Paul,

WordFence could be the culprit. Can you try temporarily disabling WordFence and then trying to check the groupblog link?

[Paul Schacht]

I deactivated WordFence, but the behavior persists. I think the general behavior you were observing earlier — “if I attempt to visit a page that doesn’t exist on your site (https://sunygeneseoenglish.org/WHATEVER), the URL will redirect back to the homepage instead of landing on the 404 page” — was caused by this line in wp-config.php:
<div>

define('NOBLOGREDIRECT', 'http://sunygeneseoenglish.org');

</div>
<div>I commented out that line in hopes that it would solve the problem with the blog links, but it didn’t. Commenting it out does, however, cause requests for non-existent pages to bring up the “nothing found” page.</div>

[Ray]

The other plugins seem fine to me, but if you want, you can disable them one at a time to see if one of them might be causing the redirect.

Some other potential things to check: Do you have any 3rd-party plugins running on the groupblog that might be causing the redirect? What is the privacy option set to for the groupblog in question?

[Paul Schacht]

I’ve deactivated each plugin in turn (except CBOX), and none of the plugins appears to be the cause of the problem.

The problem happens with all groups, whether public or private. The “Blog” link in the left navigation for the group redirects to https://sunygeneseoenglish.org/wp-admin/

• This reply was modified 8 months, 3 weeks ago by Paul Schacht.

[Ray]

On my local installation of CBOX with BP Groupblog enabled, I am not running into the groupblog redirect issue.

Like the NOBLOGREDIRECT line, do you have any other code snippets in wp-config.php, wp-content/plugins/bp-custom.php, wp-content/themes/cbox-child, or in wp-content/mu-plugins?

If not and you feel adventurous, you can try some debugging to see if the groupblog redirect URL is what is expected. After this line in bp-groupblog.php, add the following debug statement:

var_dump( $home_url ); die();

Then go to a sample groupblog URL like https://sunygeneseoenglish.org/groups/digital-humanities/blog/ and see which URL is outputted in the browser. If it matches the groupblog URL, then BP Groupblog is not the culprit. If you are still getting redirected to the main site, then another piece of code is doing a redirect somewhere.

[Paul Schacht]

Thanks, Ray. I debugged as you suggested, and indeed the URL that’s outputted to the browser is the URL for the blog e.g.,

https://dh.sunygeneseoenglish.org

so BP Groupblog is behaving as it should.

I’m not running any must-use plugins and don’t have a bp-custom.php file. I’m using a child theme but haven’t made any recent changes to it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Boone Gorges]

Very peculiar. Paul, if you’re comfortable with it, you could try (temporarily) running this small redirect logger that I’ve written: https://gist.github.com/boonebgorges/83ad69a81052c5ce43001d7c7523a586 Put it in wp-content/mu-plugins/redirect-log.php. Then, trigger the redirect. You should see a redirect-log.txt file at wp-content/uploads/. Share the relevant entries with us here.

[Ray]

Hi Paul,

Can you try the following code snippet? https://gist.github.com/r-a-y/bc390ceb5d1872044e05b3aed35431c1

Save to /wp-content/mu-plugins/wpmu-subdomain-redirects.php. WordPress, by default, has strict redirect rules and for some reason, does not allow subdomain redirects even on the same domain. The code snippet should bypass this restriction. Boone, we should probably add this to CBOX by default for subdomain network installs.

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