If you are using the "Nova" skin and profile theme, there are many different sections of your site that are loaded using "AJAX" (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) - when a request is made to an AJAX loaded section, a small "loading indicator" image is shown to let the user know that the process is working, and to give a visual hint that Jamroom is working.  If when clicking on a link you are seeing this loading indicator, but nothing ever loads, there are a couple of reasons why this can happen:

• Browser based AJAX security issue

For security reasons, your browser will NOT load a section of a page using an AJAX call if the domains do not match exactly.  This means if you are on a page such as:

http://yoursite.com

and the AJAX URL that is trying to load is:

http://www.yoursite.com

(note the addition of the "www" to the URL) the page load will FAIL, and all you will see is the busy loading indicator image.  The fix for this is to:

- Edit your jamroom/config/settings.cfg.php file and make sure the "jamroom_url" setting is EXACTLY as you want your Jamroom URL to be used.  In other words, if you want your users to see the "www" in your domain, make SURE the www is in the jamroom_url setting.

- If you have the Jamroom Power Pack installed, edit the jamroom/cgi-bin/uu_default_config.pm file (for the Jamroom upload progress meter) and make sure the "redirect_url" setting is using the SAME Domain value that you set in the previous step - make sure you include (or exclude) the "www" part.  The key here is to make the domain name part of the URL exactly the same.

- Next, you need to edit the jamroom/.htaccess file, and make sure the proper section of the Jamroom .htaccess file is uncomment depending on whether you are using "www" in your settings or not (note that if you do NOT have a .htaccess file in your Jamroom directory, you can rename the jamroom/sefjam_htaccess file that comes with Jamroom.  Make sure your FTP client is set to show "hidden" files or you will not see the .htaccess file in the first place, or it will seem to "disappear" when you rename it).

If you are using "www" in your settings, make sure this part is uncommented (or added) to your jamroom/.htaccess file:

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

If you are NOT using "www" in your domain name, use this instead:

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

These lines should be added RIGHT AFTER the following line:

RewriteEngine On

Save the file, and now when anyone tries to load a URL on your site, and they are not using the proper domain URL, they will be automatically redirected to the proper URL.

• Website Server is overloaded

The second reason you could be seeing this issue is that your web server is overloaded, and the AJAX request is either "hanging" or being discarded by the web server.  If you can log into your Jamroom, and go to the Admin Options -> Dashboard section, you may be able to see your Server Load in the "Servers" section - any consistent load over about 6 or so in the "cpu run queue" section means your server is very overloaded, and you might consider alternate hosting.

tags: htaccess, seo, urls, ajax