#3421 – Bug for view=categories URLs?

Hello,
I came across yet another "bug". Or maybe I have some wrong setting and I'm not realizing it? I will describe the issue.

In my URL manager, I'm finding stored some SEF URLs for the "view=categories" option. The "view=categories" would be the option that displays the list of all subcategories contained in a category.

The problem is... I have no menu item nor link pointing to this type of option, and never ever linked to it. But... Look:



As you can see, somehow Joomla still generated these URLs (because I know, sh404sef doesn't generate anything, Joomla does, sh404sef only converts them to SEF). Now there are two strange things here.

1. The first strange thing is that the way these URLs are getting generated by Joomla makes no sense. As you can see, they're getting generated coming from different Menu Item IDs (472, 371, 419, etc...), but all are pointing to the ROOT category, there is NO category ID in the nonsef URL. Which means all these links go to the ROOT category and show the subcategories of the root. What!? I am really confused. I have no idea why Joomla would generate URLs like these and from where. All those menu items that Joomla is using above simply are normal Category Blog layouts.

2. So, ok, Joomla want crazy and generated those nonsef URLs... But the way sh404sef is converting them to SEF is also strange. Because the SEF URL is getting generated as -> "name-of-the-category". That's it. Just the name of the category, with no parent category (despite "all nested categories" being activated in the settings and being respected for category blog layouts), and not even a trailing slash. It's just odd. As you can see. the "roster" URL even has 8 duplicates, because apparently it generated a link like that for all menu items that go to a category called "roster". I have these Category Blogs URLs:
- wwe2k17/roster/
- wwe2k16/roster/
- wwe2k15/roster/
- wwe2k14/roster/
-etc...


Now, I did see that there is a "Category view suffix" option in Configuration -> Extension -> Joomla. And in my settings, I left it empty, with the hope that, if Joomla generated a link for the "view=categories" URLs, it would simply group (as a duplicate) under the Category Blog URL (for example: "wwe2k17/roster/") and not cause issues. But instead, they're getting stored like this (just "roster"), but also, what doesn't make sense is that they're not even related to those respective categories, all of them point to the root category for some weird reason! Really nonsensical nonsef URL generated by Joomla.

This is all happening live on my live site by the way, which is: https://www.xxxx.com/
So you can check for yourself live, if you would need any admin access to check I can provide it to you.

Let me know if you have any clue about this.
Thank you!
Best Regards

As you said, this does not concern sh404SEF. Joomla (and your extensions and your template overrrides) have many way to generate those. Usually this is caused by modules, such as breadcrumbs. Some links are actually even generated even if they are not displayed - because the code creates the links first, then check the display options onl later to know if they should display this data)

I see. However they still remain very strange, it seems they have no rhyme or reason. Should I try to activate the logs that tell me from where URLs are generated to see if I find where they come from?

That would be the expected URLs, if no specific category is used in the non-sef URL

Uuuuuuuuh that's a great point. So what I'm having here is NOT "category" as the URL, but it's actually "menu-item". It's the name of the menu item in the SEF URL. So yeah, probably no fault at all for sh404SEF here, you're right, what the hell is sh404sef supposed to with these links, they have no category! But why is it using the menu?

I will try to play with "Category view suffix" option by giving it something, and I will see what happens. I would love to at least be able to group these weird URLs under just one SEF URL and call it a day. I will let you know my tests.

Oh, well, because I don't like having those URLs there. They don't make much sense. People might type "roster" manually in the URL bar and end up in that URL with the list of all categories. Or might see it in the "similar links" in page not found. I don't want URLs with important keywords (that I might want to use as aliases for other SEF URLs, actually) pointing to those nonsensical links :D
Even if I have 5000+ URLs I am very controlling and clean in what I'm storing and I'm always checking and monitoring that all URLs are good.

Yeah as of right now I don't think there is much that sh404sef can do about it. I will try to see to prevent their creation or if I find out from where they get created.
Thanks!