Weird redirect on a post – anyone seen this?

  • Resolved Deleyna

    (@deleyna)


    3 years ago

    I’ve linked to a page that no longer exists. At least for me, I’m still seeing what appears to be a json response from my client’s server. Here’s the scenario:
    We’ve never used Jetpack on this site before. Enabled it a few days ago and this is the first new post since then. (A few older posts were republished to take advantage of the reader app.)

    This post was fine, then after about 5 minutes changed and started showing this code, apparently from a redirect. Note that after the post was taken down, it did not change to a 404, so the redirect still exists somewhere. It appeared progressively like a propagation of a redirect would.

    Premium WordPress user, site shows clean. We did see a questionable plugin that looked like an update version conflict but we deleted it anyway.

    We reposted the post and removed the tag “war” because this post is related to the situation in Ukraine.
    https://loscotoff.com/week10-the-tango/

    All of the other content on the post is the same, all of the other plugins on the site are the same. Only this post seems to have the weird redirect.

    We’re good for now, but wondering if anyone else has seen anything like this?

    Wanted to make sure the Wordfence folks know this happened to us. Really hoping it is just some weird glitch on our end and not as concerning as it appears to be.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @deleyna, thanks for sharing this.

    I am experiencing a legitimate 404-style Page Not Found response from your original link, similarly with a link I made up on the spot. As this is the first time I’ve visited your site, I am probably not affected by caching, but doesn’t necessarily explain why it was focused on one particular post/page – unless nothing else on your site had been changed so there wasn’t any wrong behavior being displayed in other URLs on your site.

    It might be worth checking if you have anything unusual in .htaccess to explain a problem with permalinks. Also, _wp_old_slug might have been attempting to send visitors of that page elsewhere: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/304063/delete-redirect-slug-for-specific-post

    Feel free to drop me an update here if you discover any more information in the near future.

    Thanks,

    Peter.

    Thread Starter Deleyna

    (@deleyna)

    I’m encouraged that I’m also getting a 404 error now for the non-existent post. This is the EXPECTED behavior. Normally we DO get 404 errors from non-existent links. That was why this one was so bizarre. It does seem to have cleared up.

    I did check .htaccess first. I will look into the _wp_old_slug issue, however at the time this happened, it was a brand new post. It went live, shared to Facebook fine, shared to a couple of emails fine, then seemed to redirect via some weird propagation routine until nothing could get to the original post.

    We took it down, copied the post, and then re-released it without the tag. Nothing has bothered the new post. I was shocked when the deleted post continued to be found. I’m very happy that has resolved.

    It seemed to be that the query for that post was being changed so that rather than pulling up the post, it was pulling up a JSON response… but that really was just a guess.

    Again, thank you so much!

    Thread Starter Deleyna

    (@deleyna)

    I should mention: private window, unused browsers, changing devices… all of these still showed the wrong result even several hours after the post was deleted. So weird.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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