Aaron

Hopefully you figured this out.

Hey fozdemir,

Your message is a bit unclear because the two URLs you’ve included are the same (/brand-category/travel-holiday-deals/travel-esim-deals/). So I’m not sure what kind of redirection or loop is happening.

The main point of the answer:

If you want 404 Solution to not redirect from a non-existent page to a 404 error or to any other page, then you can create a custom redirect for that URL. In the redirect, choose the destination you want (a 404 page or a different page). If you move the redirect to the trash then the 404 may be redirected automatically anyway, if in your settings you have the “Create automatic redirects” checkbox checked (it’s the second option on the Options page for 404 Solution).

Other details:

I did create a custom post type and do some testing and I found the following.

• The 404 Solution plugin does redirect from a custom post type URL to a different URL. This happens because the custom post type URL is not a page, and therefore causes a 404 error. Note that the plugin only redirects when a 404 error is found – it does not redirect otherwise.
• I deactivated the plugin and changed the slug of the destination page (the one that was being redirected to) and even with the plugin deactivated and the new slug, WordPress still redirected me from the custom post type slug to the destination page just like before. This means that WordPress itself and not the plugin is redirecting to that page for some reason. I don’t know if this covers your situation because I don’t have the details of what kind of redirection is happening for you, but if you deactivate the 404 Solution plugin, clear your browser cache, and try again then you can see if the redirection still occurs, in which case it’s WordPress (or a different plugin) that’s redirecting you and not the 404 Solution plugin.
• After moving the destination page to the trash and with the 404 Solution plugin deactivated, I was able to get a 404 error when visiting the custom post type URL.

To summarize, without more specific information I can only guess at what’s happening. Also, there may be redirection that happening due to WordPress itself, and not due to the plugin. 404 Solution only redirects if a page does NOT exist and a URL causes a 404 error. So for it to redirect from a custom post type URL it means that URL is causing a 404.

Please note that custom post types are not like categories, e.g website.com/category/category-name/ automatically has a page in WordPress and does not cause a 404 error – it lists the pages in that category. A custom post type is not the same. When you go to website.com/custom-post-type/ it causes a 404 error.

The 404 Solution plugin redirects 404 errors based on the URL and especially the last part of a URL. Therefore, if there is a page or post with the slug “travel-esim-deals” or anything similar to the slug of the custom post type, 404 Solution will redirect from the custom post type to that page. My guess is that what you want to happen is for the site to list the posts in the custom post type. I couldn’t find a plugin that does that – all of the examples I found involved adding custom files and PHP code.

Let me know if you need more clarification or want to provide more details.

thanks

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by Aaron.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by Aaron.

Thank you crzyhrse!

Hello,

There should be no issues as the plugin code isn’t invoked unless a 404 occurs. Just let me know if there are any issues.

regards

Aaron

Yes. There’s a section in the options named “Files and Folders Ignore Strings – Do Not Process” under “Advanced Settings (Etc)”. You can add the path part of the URL to ignore there.

Also I believe if you add the URL as a redirect with the “default 404 page” as the destination then the result may be the same.

Hey, thanks for letting me know!

I fixed the issue in version 2.33.1 which was released on October 13th. You can go ahead and upgrade to version 2.34.0 which has other fixes. I don’t know if it’s really “sensitive” information. It’s that the debug log file always had the same name so you could go to website.com/…/debug_log.txt or whatever and see the debug log. From version 2.33.1 onward the log file has a random name.

Let me know if there’s anything else.

I’m not really sure what you’re referring to. Please include a screenshot and describe the page you’re on, what you expect to happen and what’s actually happening.

Thank you so much for your feedback. It’s very reassuring. Yes, I have those settings.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Aaron.

I was able to view the log file on your site.

As I said though, there are no values in the referrer (or “referer”) field, so we can’t tell where the requests came from or why they’re happening. I’m not sure what else you’d like me to look at specifically.

You could ignore the 404s.

You could setup a regular expression redirect that looks for that pdf file and redirects people to somewhere (the pdf file or the about page or whatever).

You could search the database table wp_posts for references to that file.

You could use a tool like https://validator.w3.org/checklink to check for broken links, which may or may not include a reference to the file.

I don’t know why you’re getting those 404s either. Unfortunately the plugin can only record the 404s and can’t tell you why or where they came from. The best we can do is look at the Logs tab and look at the “Referrer” column to see if there’s any information there.

Thanks amreshkramar!

Well, let me know if you figure it out.

Hey,

The plugin doesn’t delete the tables when you delete the plugin. You can delete them manually using phpMyAdmin by clicking the table name and then clicking “Delete the table (DROP)” under the “Operations” tab, or if you can execute sql directly you can type “drop table wp_abj404_logsv2” (etc) for each table, or you can run

SELECT CONCAT('DROP TABLE ', table_name, ';')
FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_schema = 'your_database_name' AND table_name LIKE '%abj404%';

which will give you a list of the commands you can run to delete the tables.

Ideally all plugins should, by default, delete everything they install when deleted

Yes. I think you’re right. I should fix that.

the custom 404 page I created, while it is still in my list of pages (I kept it for possible future use), should not appear any more, but it is
so is there some file I have missed, or some alteration made to a WordPress, theme or other file that is still calling the custom page?

I think what you’re getting at is that since the tables were left behind and they should have been deleted, maybe the plugin wasn’t deleted entirely and is still running somehow. That’s definitely not what’s happening. If the plugin was uninstalled then it’s not running anymore. You can check that the files were deleted from the file system if you like, e.g. in the /website/wp-content/plugins/404-solution directory. It should either be empty or not there at all if the plugin was uninstalled. The plugin doesn’t alter any files or tables except for its own. I think that’s called a virus if it does that. ??

My guess about your custom 404 page still appearing is that although the plugin doesn’t reference it, something else is causing users to get to that page. If you want to keep the page but don’t want people to see it, you could change its status from “Published” to “Draft” (for example).

If people are still being forwarded to that page and they shouldn’t be, perhaps a different plugin is causing that. You could disable all plugins and see if the issue still happens or not. If not then you can reenable each plugin one by one to see which one is causing that particular issue.

So I don’t know how the old site can tell what the URL will be on the new site. If there were a product number that were the same then it would be possible, for example.

For example if the old URL washttps://www.kotinos.com.gr/categories/pendants/12345and the new URL was https://kotinosjewelry.com/product/12345 then you could create a regex redirect from categories/pendants/(.*) with a destination of https://kotinosjewelry.com/product/$1 and it would redirect from

https://www.kotinos.com.gr/categories/pendants/6789 to

https://kotinosjewelry.com/product/6789

In the example you gave me though, the product details page part of the URL changes from phaistos-gold-pendant-3-detail to phaistos-disc-pendant-no3. So I don’t know of a way to handle that.