[SOLVED] "Not found" articles show a wrong article

[mbria]

Hi fellows,

Recently we found a kind of bug that is really annoying and surprising.

On OJS 2.3.6, when you visit a non existing article (for instance: http://papers.uab.cat/article/view/wrongURL or http://papers.uab.cat/article/view/mustShow404) OJS always shows the same article (http://papers.uab.cat/article/view/v97-n3-parella) instead of a 404 error (or better, the searcher page).

This creates incorrect statistics, and generic searchers (as google) wrongly index the magazines, giving more presence to this random article (I didn't discover yet why this article and not others) or could penalise a magazine for content duplicity.

I tested it on a clean OJS, as well as in other magazines hosted in a different server with different mod_rewrite rules and the result is always the same.

http://psicologiasocial.uab.es/athenea/index.php/atheneaDigital/article/view/show404
http://rusc.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/rusc/article/view/mustShow404

The funny part is that old OJS versions (not sure about the exact version because all magazines I manage are now 2.3.6) redirect to index:
http://artnodes.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/artnodes/article/view/mustShow404

I searched about this issue in the forum but I didn't find any post about it.

Any clue about how to fix it? should I open an issue in the bug track system?

Thanks for your help,
m.

[asmecher]

Hi mbria,

Yes, that definitely sounds like a bug. Please file it in Bugzilla against OJS 2.3.8 and I'll take it from there. (Drop a link back to this conversation for bonus points.)

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[asmecher]

Hi all,

Posted to Bugzilla -- see http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7679.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[mbria]

Alec developed a patch against OJS 2.3.6 and 2.3.7 that solves the issue:
http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7679

Cheers,
m.