A few registrations not saving

[conductorchris]

Registrations are coming in for our event, the first after upgrading both civicrm and joomla.  Unfortunately a few people (including board members) are unable to register -- after filling out the first page it kicks back to the home page instead of showing the confirmation page and the registration is unsaved and the member under the impression they had registered.

I've had an awful time understanding what was going on and was unable to reproduce the problem.  At first I thought it was just user error -- that people weren't pressing the continue button.  Then it did happen to me when I wasn't expecting it (I didn't notice anything unusual) but I was unable to repeat it.  Searching the forums hasn't turned up anything except a possible suggestion there could be a problem if the www. doesn't match.  Since users could be using either www.railvermont.org or railvermont.org, that is possible, but in my tests it seems to work both ways.   

Any suggestion what might be happening, what I might do and if there is something to search for that might have an answer?

Thanks
Christopher

[davyivins]

Hi Christopher

I can't help with your Joomla issue but you can amend your htaccess file to redirect users to use either www. or without www.
Below is a copy of the relevant part of my site's .htaccess file. Our preference is without the www.

.....

# Various rewrite rules.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on

  # If your site can be accessed both with and without the 'www.' prefix, you
  # can use one of the following settings to redirect users to your preferred
  # URL, either WITH or WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix. Choose ONLY one option:
  #
  # To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
  # (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
  # adapt and uncomment the following:
  # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^purcosa\.co.za$ [NC]
  # RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.purcosa.co.za/$1 [L,R=301]
  #
  # To redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix,
  # (http://www.example.com/... will be redirected to http://example.com/...)
  # uncomment and adapt the following:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.purcosa\.co.za$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://purcosa.co.za/$1 [L,R=301]

[conductorchris]

further testing and I have found where the problem is happening.

The email I sent has a link to
http://railvermont.org/about-vran/annual-meeting.html

rather than
http://www.railvermont.org/about-vran/annual-meeting.html

I hadn't noticed the problem because the link works fine and the registration page opens - only the follow up behavior on clicking is giving the problem.

I tried throwing up a redirect on the .htaccess page using the code davyivins provided (thanks!) and that had no visible effect - pages still loaded as railvermont.org and the problem remained.  I tried .htaccess code to specifically redirect that problem full url and it didn't change the address shown in the browser but did change the result from being thrown back to the home page to getting an error.  That's worse.  So I contacted my host and they added the code suggested by davyivins in the .htaccess file which worked and seems to have solved the problem (thanks, civihosting!  Also, they replied to me in less that 15 minutes despite the late hour!)'  I have no idea why it worked for them and not me, but I am not complaining.

Christopher