CiviEvent dumping to home page if a required field is not completed

[elohim]

I am using CiviCRM on a Joomla 3.3.6 site. When someone registers for an event and does not complete one of the required fields the site dumps to the home page when they click continue instead of giving the error message about completing the required field.

I was using CiviCRM 4.4 but an upgrade to CiviCRM 4.5.6 did not solve the problem.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any ideas on what could be causing it?

[p946]

We have this same problem on Joomla 3.4.0.  It's very confusing for some of our users and is likely costing us some registrations.  I haven't figured out what exactly causes the issue but I have some clues.  The issue is definitely affected by which browser is being used as well as cookies/cache/session data.  Safari never works, even if all data is input correctly.  I've tried clearing the cache and using private browsing mode without success.  This may be the biggest problem, since it prevents many Apple users from registering.  Internet explorer seems to function best, though I haven't tested it extensively.  Chrome and Firefox seem to behave similarly such that the issue appears after waiting a while.

I'm not exactly sure what triggers the issue, but my guess is starting a registration, leaving, and then waiting X number of hours triggers it.  At this point all registrations redirect to the main site page when something isn't filled out properly.  This is very frustrating for users since it wipes all their form data when they make a slight mistake.  This problem can be fixed temporarily in both Firefox and Chrome by clearing everything in the browser including cookies, session data, the cache, etc.  After clearing the cache/cookies/sessions and trying to register this message appears: "Your browser session has expired and we are unable to complete your form submission. We have returned you to the initial step so you can complete and resubmit the form. If you experience continued difficulties, please contact us for assistance."  My current guess is the issue is related to session data or cookies.

I've checked the JavaScript console and no errors appear there.  I also see no related errors in the PHP error logs, nor the Apache error logs.  If it would be helpful for anyone I can post a link to one of our events.  Thanks for any help if anyone has any ideas on how to fix this.

[p946]

For anyone else with this problem the fix turned out to be something relatively simple.  If your site allows access on both http://www.[site].com and http://[site].com, CiviCRM will dump you to the home page if you try to access it using the option that isn't defined in the System Settings -> Resource URLs options and the civicrm.settings.php file.  In our case CiviCRM was set to work on the http://[site].com version of our site so whenever someone tried to register for an event using the http://www.[site].com version it would kick them to the homepage. 

To solve this problem we added a 301 redirect in our .htaccess file to redirect the http://[site].com version to http://www.[site].com and then updated the CiviCRM settings to use the www version.  If anyone is wondering how to do this simply add the following two lines to the custom redirects section of your public_html folder .htaccess file.  This seems to work for both https and http.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

I'm not really sure why clearing the cache seemed to help temporarily and why it seemed to work on some browsers but not others.  Regardless, the above fix seems to fix the problem permanently across all browsers.