how to remove ?catid

[topfurniture]

Can anyone tell me if there is some code that i can insert into my .htaccess file to try and remove any instances of ?catid= or ?catid=0 from the end of urls? I'm getting some people browsing our topfurniture.co.uk domain and getting these extra bit on the urls as shown below. When i browse to this page i dont get the ?catid=0 but appearing but some people are when i go through the statcounter browse history and i can see any real pattern as to why some get it and some dont. Its a Joomla 1.5.4 and Virtuemart 1.1.2 website using the latest version of SH404SEF.. any ideas?

http://www.example.co.uk/oak-dining-table.html?catid=0

I've also posted on the thread below which may have some additional info to help resolve this

[forum.joomla.org...]

[edited by: jdMorgan at 7:36 pm (utc) on May 13, 2009]
[edit reason] example.co.uk [/edit]

[Philosopher]

Well you can certainly setup a 301 redirect so when people hit that URL, they are bounced to the URL without the query string.

However, to actually get rid of it, you are going to need to find where it is on your site that it is being generated and fix it from within joomla.

[jdMorgan]

Look at your raw server access logs, and find the lines with requests for these pages with the spurious catid queries. Examine the logged referrer field in those lines; In some cases it may be blank, but in others it will tell you what page the user was on when he/she clicked the link containing the URL with the spurious catid appended. That will allow you to look at that page, and see if you see the catid in the link when you hover over it. If so, this will help when you report the bug.

Philosopher is right; Fix the problem at its source, rather than applying a bandage after the fact.

Jim

[topfurniture]

Thanks both, I have finally figured out how these characters were appearing. Its when people click on the prev next buttons that i had enable in thje parameters in article manager. I'm guessing many other may also have this problem but might not have noticed it. Any suggestions on how this can be resolved?

I resolved it with the products in Virtuemart by updating some code in the flypage file after reading this article below so maybe a similar fix can be applied to some config files within Joomla?

[artio.net...]

[g1smd]

Previous/Next links are messed up in many dynamic sites: not just Joomla, but in many forum and blog applications too.