Fixing “Too many redirects” error in MediaWiki

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I run a wiki for my ParrotCichlid.com fish fancier’s site, based on “MediaWiki.” It had been running fine, except for an increasing problem with spam, but one day it simply stopped working. Browsing to the site would result in the following error message:

Too many redirects occurred trying to open “http://parrotcichlid.com/book/index.php/Main_Page”. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page which then is redirected to open the original page.


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I checked the database thoroughly to determine if I had made any recent revisions that might have redirected one page to another, but it did not appear to be the case. I even restored the database to a backup from several months ago, and it did not help matters. The .htaccess files all appeared to be untouched.

I found that URL’s of the type:

http://parrotcichlid.com/book/index.php/some_title

always resulted in the error. However using the long form,

http://parrotichlid.com/book/index.php?title=some_title

worked fine. I found that in localsettings.php, you can choose whether to use the ugly URLs or the pretty ones. Setting them to pretty now results in the redirect error on my site.

prettyURL.jpg

Setting them to “ugly” works fine.


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I can only assume that some change was made to the apache settings by my webhost which affected this type of redirect.

Update: It turned out this was caused by the webhost enabling PhpSuexec on the server. Additional information on this is here:

  • MediaWiki + phpSuEXEC = Fail?
  • PhpSuexec – what do I need to know?