CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Version: 2.0.3
Context: A contact who has received a CiviMail email containing a {unsubscribeUrl} token
Action: The contact attempts to unsubscribe via the link
Expected behaviour: The unsubscribe works
Observed behaviour: The following page is shown ...

Sorry. A non-recoverable error has occurred.

CiviCRM requires session support for Joomla front-end pages. Please modify index.php in the root folder of your front-end Joomla site as described in the step 3 of this CiviCRM documentation page.

Return to home page.

Notes: I've already made the necessary changes to the front end (event registrations work).

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Lobo,

The problem occurs when an anonymous user presses the "Unsubscribe" button on the Unsubscribe screen (which loads OK).

On further investigation of my CiviMail mailing reports, unsubscribes were working up to about August 14th. Since then I've made 2 changes:

• created 2 event registration pages
  
  • Made the change to index.php to support sessions on the front
  • Edited CIVICRM_UF_BASEURL in the front-end civicrm.settings.php to point to my site's front-end rather than back-end URL (because I was getting a similar message (!?))
• applied the patch for CRM-3384 to allow commas in trackable URLs (Joomla!s search-engine-friendly URLs have this form)

I suspect it's my configuration. I can (triple) check my changes to index.php, and (as a fallback) revert from using action.unsubscribeUrl to action.unsubscribe.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated,
Ken

I checked my configuration against the files downloaded with CiviCRM 2.0.3. These are the only differences ...

• The file administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/civicrm.config.php requires administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm.settings.php as set up by the installation process
• The front-end index.php contains the following additional lines which I added
  Quote

  104a105,108
  > // These lines are needed for proper function of CiviCRM at the frontend
  > session_name( md5( $mosConfig_live_site . '_frontend' ));
  > session_start();
  >
• The front-end civicrm.settings.php contains: define( 'CIVICRM_UF_BASEURL', 'http://www.citybibleforum.org/' );
• The administrator civicrm.settings.php contains: define( 'CIVICRM_UF_BASEURL', 'http://www.citybibleforum.org/administrator/' );

Pankaj,

Thanks for your input.

IMHO, I think the '<=' is correct, and should not be changed. (however, I have no idea about what's appropriate for 2.1 - I'm using 2.0.3)

Summary
I think the issue is that the unsubscribe logic is not storing parameters in the session (unlike event registration, which does). Therefore, when the POST is processed (upon pressing "Unsubscribe") the logic in civicrm.php is only finding 1 variable stored in $_SESSION (for me, that is 'CiviCRM' => [ 'domainId' => 1 ] ).

Detail

• I reproduced the problem on my laptop
• I noticed that unsubscribe works after I register for an event, but not otherwise
• In my debugger, I noticed that $_SESSION contains remnants of the event-registration data when I subsequently unsubscribe, allowing the code to get past the test 'count( $_SESSION ) <= 1'
• Looking at how CiviCRM uses $_SESSION, I looked for differences between event-registration and unsubscribe ...

• CRM/Event/Page/EventInfo.php, run(), line 57
  Quote

  $id      = CRM_Utils_Request::retrieve( 'id'    , 'Positive', $this, true );
• CRM/Mailing/Page/Common.php, run(), line 47
  Quote

  $job_id   = CRM_Utils_Request::retrieve( 'jid', 'Integer', CRM_Core_DAO::$_nullObject );

• I interpret this to mean that event-registration stores variables from $_GET into $_SESSION (via $this) while unsubscribe does not.
• I can't explain why my CiviMail mailing reports indicate people were able to unsubscribe using the URL. The code seems to indicate it should never work - is there some condition where the "Unsubscribe" button uses a HTTP GET rather than a POST? (thereby avoiding the 'count( $_SESSION ) <= 1' test)

Ken:

a few things:

1. Joomla 1.5.x has built in session support for the front end, so that code is not needed anymore

2. we can change the condition to:

if ( ! array_key_exists( 'CiviCRM', $_SESSION ) ) { .... }

I think the above condition is a better more accurate check.

3. Unsubscribe does not use the session (most other front end pages do).  It basically redirects to the same page and sends in all the parameters. Hence it does not store the variables in the session. This was code written very early on and hence does not follow our normal pattern

lobo