Joomla and K2 Soft404 errors

Question

We are using Joomla for a public site and we are getting a ton of soft 404 errors that all look similar to

/?option=com_k2&view=itemlist&task=user&id=xxx

where xxx = some numeric id. Obviously this is some soft of spamming but how do I turn it off in Joomla/K2?

I'm not particularly Joomla oriented but this seems a task I should be able to accomplish if I can get an idea of "where" to fix the code. The page shows a warning instead of an error

Warning JUser: :_load: Unable to load user with ID: 35414

so it seems the "page" is actually there but with no content. I'm guessing some internal handler is spitting this dynamic content out but I want to return 404 in this case. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm trying to understand the nature of your problem. What do you mean with "Soft 404" errors? Do you have 404 errors or not?

On my K2 websites, I have sometimes "visitors" who try to find holes in K2. I then have many, many accesses of the same page. These visitors try to post comments or somethings else on the articles or user profiles.

Is this a similar thing that is happening on your site?

• Is there a (Joomla) user on your site with ID 35414? If not, you can be pretty sure that someone is trying to hack your site.
• Is the URL always requested by the same user? You can find this in the log files of the Apache server. In such cases I add a "deny from" statement to my .htaccess file.

In case you seriously expect a K2 related issue, I would recommend to post the issue in the K2 forum . This forum is quite knowledgeable and JoomlaWorks makes a serious effort to bring good K2 customer support.