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#1101 – Images not showing randomly

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Friday, 02 October 2015 20:36 UTC

pigga

Hi all.
The site worked flawlessly for many years, but now I have the problem that Images are not appearing in the article randomly.
I noticed this since the last recent update to version 3.4.4., but I am quite sure that this issue has not appeared before.
The funny thing is that it is not 100% reproducible, so the Image within the article may appear or it may not. I tried a lot, but whenever I deactivate SH404 the error has gone.
However, when I enable Joomlas standard URL rewrite, the error comes back. So I assume it is related to the URL rewrite mechanism and not to SH404SEF.
I read the article at http://www.itoctopus.com/images-not-appearing-on-your-joomla-website a few days ago. It seems to describe quite exactly the problems I am facing.
[xxxx]Your text to link here...
And suddenly the main image dissapears:
[xxxx]Your text to link here...
Furthermore, akeeba-backup stopped working. So probably it s related to my provider's settings due to some changes in php.ini?
However I am stumped at the moment. Any help is higly appreciated!
Ah btw: I am using JCE Editor and JCE Mediabox but both work flawlessly without URL Rewrite.
www.xxxx.info
Regards,
Thomas

Saturday, 03 October 2015 09:40 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

I posted a comment on that itoctopus page, as it's totally incorrect about the reason and the solutions for image links to not show. That's the problem with the internet, just because it's there and look reasonable doesn't make it true.

Please provide a link to one page where the problem is happening. You can already check yourself what the real problem is by using Firebug or Chrome dev tools and see if you have 404s showing for those missing images. This can tell what the wrong link is.

Another thing is that when you have intermittent problems like this, it's pretty much always linked to page caching: old pages stored in cache are good, some pages are created with wrong links, etc.

What you have to do is find one single page where this can be seen. If you can't reproduce on one page, you still have to pick one single page we run tests on and talk about.

Then the next thing is to identify an error. Image not showing is not error. It's the consequence of an error happening somewhere.
So another good step is to enable Joomla error reporting and set it to maximum (disable GZIP in Joomla configuration before you enable error reporting as this can cause display errors when both are enabled).

Furthermore, akeeba-backup stopped working

As with the images not showing, yo don't know what's happening until you have an error message. Enabling error display as mentioned above may provide information about the cause of the "not working".

Rgds

Saturday, 03 October 2015 09:43 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

OK, that was easier than I thought. I just did what I explained above and you do have relative links:
xxxx

And here the source code of your page where you can see the problem:
xxxx

It looks like those where created with JCE, so you might want to look at the JCE settings, maybe you have turned off "Use absolute URLs" (needs to be on).

Also note that you have another similar error with one of your CSS file, in the mod_visitorcounter module. Probably a bug in the module itself, not creating the link correctly.

Rgds

Monday, 05 October 2015 21:58 UTC

pigga

Hi Weeblr-Team!
Thanks for your fast reply. I think this at least points me into the right direction.

Regarding the pre-history about when the error occured: I updated JCE and JCE Mediabox about one week ago. At first glance the page still seemed to be working but I never expected any sporadic issue. So maybe at this point things went bad. I have no Idea.

However, before upgrading Joomla to latest version I tried to backup the site and I noticed that Akeeba had stopped working.
I made a manual backup of the files and the database and then I upgraded to latest version of Joomla. Unfortunately, Akeeba still doesn't work. That led me to the conclusion that probably my hosting company had changed some PHP settings which are causing trouble, because I never had encountered any Akeeba problems before. Backup batch process stops when it tries to incorporate the Database/Folder-Filter. And when I try to choose these options in the Akeeba Dasboard, it always returns a blank page.

But back to the problem:
When I clear the cache and load a page like let's say
http://www.xxxx.info/beetgestaltung/gartengestaltung.html
The Image at top of the page appears and has the correct link
http://www.xxxx.info/images/stories/detail_Eingang_am_Gartenhaus400px.jpg
When I reload the site the Image disappears and the source code shows the link
http://www.xxxx.info/beetgestaltung/images/stories/detail_Eingang_am_Gartenhaus400px.jpg
So what is causing this? Is it JCE?
I changed in JCEs "Profile"-Settings URLs from "Relative" to "Absolute" but it did not make any difference. Still it loads Images at 1st time and then it fails.

Am I missing any setting in SHS404SEF or in JCE (that might have been re-set during update)? I had no problems in combination of JCE/JCE Mediabox and SH404SEF so far. It's really odd.

Regards,
Thomas

Tuesday, 06 October 2015 08:31 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

First, this is totally unrelated to sh404SEF; it's a simple technical issue: links must be absolute so that they resolve to the current address on your server.
Don't think it has anything to do with JCE either, as you say the link is correct on the first load and disapear later on.

Intermittent issues like this are usually linked to caching (not always, but often). So, you may want to check that:
- you disable all Joomla caching (in global configuration and on the system plugin page, disable the Joomla cache plugin)
- check if you use cloudflare or similar CDN, try disabling if possible
- does your hosting company has a caching mechanism? disable that if possible
- try to switch to one of Joomla default template and see if the same happens

I changed in JCEs "Profile"-Settings URLs from "Relative" to "Absolute" but it did not make any difference. Still it loads Images at 1st time and then it fails.

After changing that setting, did you resave the test article?

Rgds

Tuesday, 06 October 2015 17:58 UTC

pigga

After changing that setting, did you resave the test article?

Ah that makes sense of course! Oh dear...and I was wondering how a change of the profile settings can influence the generation of URLs.... Sometimes the main error is sitting in front of the screen :-)
Ok, after changing the Settings in my default JCE profile and re-saving the articleIT WORKS! Phew.
Thank you so much for your support. I never ever had been able to resolve this issue on my own.
The downside is that I will have to re-save all articles, right?
I still cannot totally understand what has happened that the site suddenly stopped working because I have never ever touched that setting. That's really odd isn't it?

Again: Thanks a lot. I will try to bring the site back to life and give feedback if I succeeded.
Regards,
Thomas

Wednesday, 07 October 2015 12:28 UTC

wb_weeblr

The downside is that I will have to re-save all articles, right?

I still cannot totally understand what has happened that the site suddenly stopped working because I have never ever touched that setting. That's really odd isn't it?

Yes, I'd assume so, at least all of those which have images or other links in them. But if this problem is related to last JCE update, it doesn't make much sense that articles created or last saved before the update are affected?
Did you change any other setting recently, for instance in Joomla config?

As far as I know, JCE comes with the URL settings to "Absolute" by default (I don't even know why they have such setting actually, I don't see any situation where it'd be good to use relative URLs).

Rgds

Wednesday, 14 October 2015 22:37 UTC

pigga

Hi Weeblr-Team.
It took some time, but this is what I foud out:
As I wrote above, I noticed that Akeeba had stopped working just when the problems with broken SEF-URLs arised.
Changing the links to absolute in JCE worked for JCE Images, but whenever I reloaded any page, the SH404SEF social Buttons dissapeared and the {SH404SEF_social_button} appeared in the text instead. Furthermore I noticed that the thumbnails of Phoca-Gallery images were present inside the article but whenever I tried to klick on any photo an error occured due to wrong image URL.
As far as I could see, the joomla router generated wrong image URL like some kind of
http://mydomain.de/categoryname/images/stories/image.jpg
instead of
http://mydomain.de/images/stories/image.jpg (as it should be).
The problem happened with SH404SEF and with default Joomla SEF as well.
I assume that this is the reason why the SH404SEF social buttons diappeared as well?

Yesterday and today I found some time and installed a backup of that page from June 2015 inside a subdomain of the webspace. It was running on Joomla 3.4.1 and five components were outdated as well.
I upgraded all components step by step and finally Joomla as well and -guess what- the Site works!??
Even the mysterious Akeeba-Error has gone. And I did NOT change the url-settings in JCE after restoring the backup. Everything seems back to normal.

I assume that something has broken some data of my site or of my sql database that did not yet break the whole system but that made system acting weird?

Ok, as it turned out this was no SH404SEF related problem at all, but maybe the "Solution" of the problem is helpful for anyone?

Regards and thanks for your great support!
Thomas

P.S.: During my investigation I found out that the standard Joomla SEF plugin is active. Everthing seems to work so far, can standard SEF plugin interfere with SH404SEF plugin?

Thursday, 15 October 2015 12:57 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

That would indeed be the most "logical" solution: ie, if nothing was changed, then the source of the problem is external.
Once things get broken, you can't really guess what the consequences are. If the sh404SEF social was disabled or broken somehow, then it wouldn't be loaded and do the social buttons replacements. There are many explanations, but if the files or the db content was damaged, it's a lost cause.

P.S.: During my investigation I found out that the standard Joomla SEF plugin is active. Everthing seems to work so far, can standard SEF plugin interfere with SH404SEF plugin?

They are not at all doing the same thing, and the Joomla SEF plugin is absolutely mandatory. It's this plugin which scan the content of a page just before display, searching for links (images, other pages links, ...) and turns them into SEF links. To turn them into SEF links, it will call sh404SEF to do that, but if the SEF plugin is not enabled, the links are not going to be properly prefixed with the site root URL or such, and nothing will work most likely.

Good job on the detective work ;) it certainly shows the need for frequent and tested backups, to which you can come back if something goes wrong!

Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

If you created any superadmin account for us, be sure to delete or block it now to avoid unecessary risk in the future.

Rgds

This ticket is closed, therefore read-only. You can no longer reply to it. If you need to provide more information, please open a new ticket and mention this ticket's number.