DOAJ / Google hits, suddenly "Not found"

Software Support
1

Hi all

We had an issue with our hosting provider a short time ago where all our journals suddenly came back with a “Not found” 404 message (front page worked, none of the sub pages did). They looked into it and “fixed” the issue. Now the site works, but it seems all the links are suddenly different. I do not think they did anything to OJS, as this is something we have installed ourselves and they have no knowledge of the system.

As an example.

When we registered the journal Maal og minne with DOAJ, the link was as follows: http://ojs.novus.no/index.php/MOM (same address google points to when searching for the journal on google).

After the “fix” it is suddenly: Novus - Online tidsskrifter

Is this a setting in OJS? Why has this changed? We did nothing before it stopped working.

Still on 2.4.7.1

Best regards
Geir Rosset
Novus Press

2

Hi Geir,

It looks like your hosting provider perhaps edited your config.inc.php file and set the parameter for disabling path info to On:

disable_path_info = On

This will have the effect you describe. Normally, OJS would use the path info to retrieve parameters instead, which is your old behaviour. I suspect they changed something in their server environment that broke PATH_INFO and the fix was to alter your configuration.

Cheers,
Jason

3

You’re right. That was set to On. But for us, that is a no go fix as any reference to any article in any of our journals would thus be broken. So I have to ask them if that is indeed what they did. Any suggestion as to what can cause PATH_INFO to stop working server side? We need things to be as they were. Or is there some other way to forward those old paths to the new? Can’t have hundreds of dead links anywhere from Google to DOAJ to hard copies.

4

Hi Geir,

Off the top of my head, this can happen if Apache is upgraded and AcceptPathInfo is set to Off in httpd.conf, but checking the web server headers from your server it looks like you’re using Open Resty, which is based off of NGINX. I’m really not familiar with that, but perhaps your web host migrated from Apache to that and broke something in the process?

Cheers,
Jason