Sensei LMS creating endless redirects on login page and my-courses pages

Hi JMaartenW,

Really sorry to hear that! It sounds like you’ve already taken a lot of the troubleshooting steps we would recommend.

Just to confirm, this is when you updated to Sensei LMS 4.13.1 and WordPress 6.2?

yes correct and all other plugins that needed updating last week.

we run an update cycle every month and this month, Sensei LMS broke.

i’ve had to change the login page to use the wp-login so that once users are logged in the page my-courses from sensei LMS works ok.

if you click on the my-courses page as a non logged in user you get endless re-directs. when i disable sensei LMS plugin this stops. I also cleared Cloudflare cache and proxy settings to no avail…

Hi there, @jmaartenw,

I checked your site and I can reproduce the issue. I also noticed that the course page loads okay, which is a good place to start.

It seems like a possible permalink issue; do you also have any site translation in place?

i’ve had to change the login page to use the wp-login so that once users are logged in the page my-courses from sensei LMS works ok.

This ^^ made me think that there might be a conflict between the permalinks and the login plugin you’re using in lieu of the default wp-admin. What I usually recommend is to try re-saving the permalinks after deactivating all the third-party plugins at once, and then clear the browser cache and check the issue again.

If that works out, it means that the issue is with the third-party plugin you use for the students login. Hope I didn’t misunderstand your issue!

Let me know how you get on.

hi,

Thanks for the tip. but I already tried that, as that is the usual first test when having issues with redirects. I changed the permalinks to another option, saved it, cleared cache, and changed it back again and clearing cache. it did not resolve the issue. I am not using any other plugin for login page. I do use UAM plugin to control membership content such as the courses for different cohorts. I think Sensei uses it’s only login page [#senseiloginlogout] which is no longer working, hence the reason to changing it to the wp-login page so that cohorts can still login and work.

the my-courses page works after you’re logged in but the redirect to the sensei login page creates too many redirects. as I’ve said i’ve disabled all plugins and changed the theme and the issue still exists, only when disabling sensei LMS does the page my-courses work but obviously that’s because sensei lms plugin is not redirecting it.

how do we proceed from here to get this resolved in a timely fashion?

Hello @jmaartenw,

Apolgies for the late reply. From what I understood so far, it seems like the workaround you found to fix the redirect loop issue is to have your students login via the wp-admin panel, so they can access their my-courses page.

I tried to access the page as a non-logged user, and I can see the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error. As mentioned before, I do think this is not a plugin bug, but rather something that’s interfering with the plugin.

Since you don’t seem to pinpoint the blocker in your production site, I’d suggest you to get a fresh install or a staging site, and try reproduce that in there: this way you should be able to find out what’s causing the issue.

My hunch is still on a permalink issue or on a hard-written rule in the .htaccess file.

Let me know what you find out!

There has been no changes with the .htaccess file since it was first set up.

if it was a htaccess issue then it would affect more pages then just the my-courses page.

not sure what else I can do with permalinks that i haven’t already tried.

can you confirm what is the normal behaviour of the plugin when you click on the my-courses page as a guest user when the page is only accessible to logged in users?

clicking the page is doing this

https://www.collectivespace.org.uk/my-courses/?redirect_to=/my-courses/

this is the only code on the my-courses page. I don’t know were it comes from, presumably from the sensei LMS plugin

<!-- wp:sensei-lms/learner-courses {"options":{"layoutView":"list","courseDescriptionEnabled":true,"featuredImageEnabled":true,"courseCategoryEnabled":false,"progressBarEnabled":true,"progressBarBorderRadius":10,"progressBarHeight":14,"accentColor":"#91ce94"},"className":"course-image"} /-->

<!-- wp:sensei-lms/button-learner-messages {"className":"is-style-default"} -->
<div class="wp-block-sensei-lms-button-learner-messages is-style-default wp-block-sensei-button wp-block-button has-text-align-left"><a class="wp-block-button__link">My Messages</a></div>
<!-- /wp:sensei-lms/button-learner-messages -->

Hello @jmaartenw,

Our developers took a look at your issue, and weren’t able to reproduce it on their end. They suspect there must be something else interfering with the page and redirect functionality, so we’d like you to perform again a test to rule out any plugin conflict.

If I recall it well, it’s possible that I have already asked that, but I’ll paste below again the steps to do it:

temporarily deactivate all plugins except Sensei to see if there’s a plugin conflict. The Health Check plugin helps you to do that in the Troubleshooting mode without disrupting the live site:

1) Install and activate the Health Check & Troubleshoot plugin from the Plugins page.
2) Enable the Troubleshooting Mode from this plugin and a default WordPress theme, and make sure only the Sensei Pro and Sensei LMS plugin is active. Here is how it should look:
Screencast Link:https://d.pr/v/qJSK8d
3) Check the live site and see if you can reproduce the issue.
4) If you can’t reproduce the issue and all works well, it means that one of the plugins is causing the issue. Enable the other plugins, one by one, and check the search after every plugin enabling and see when the issue appears; do the same with the theme by enabling the theme you want to use. Please note that all these actions will not be noticed by your site visitors, so there is nothing to worry about.

****

If you don’t want to do these tests on your live site, many hosts provide a staging service, where you can do testing without affecting the live site. You can ask your host about this. If they don’t give you a staging site, you could try WP Staging or Duplicator:

• https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-staging/
• https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/duplicator/

Let me know what you find out!

hi,

I created a staging site and completely stripped it apart and played about with lots of settings. in the end i uninstalled and reinstalled Sensei plugin which resolved the settings. then on the live site i change the default pages in the settings and put them back to the original pages like my-courses and that had the same impact of fixing the issue. my deduction is there was a corruption or some issue with the sensei plugin where it did not recognise the actually pages that were set up. by re-applying the pages like our-courses it recognised this page as a valid page and the redirections stopped occurring…

Hi there, @jmaartenw,

Great catch and good troubleshooting. I am glad you eventually managed to fix the issue, even if it took a little while to figure it out.

I think you’re all set now. I’m going to mark this thread as solved. If you have any further questions or need more help, you’re welcome to open another thread here. Cheers!