Wrong Document Context – Chrome Disallowing a Redirect?

The way that we post about our monthly events here at SEMpdx, is that we create blog posts, we categorize them so they’ll appear in the menus and sliders where we want them to, and for the registration, we use a third party called Wild Apricot.

Before that we used Eventbrite, and now we’re starting to use Bizzbo, but one thing they all have in common is that we embed a widget – an iframe – in order to accept registration on our site.

The user experience while registering through the Wild Apricot iframe was less than stellar, so a couple of years ago, we came up with a simple solution, which was to redirect the page right to the Wild Apricot Event page. Users click to the upcoming event post, and get where they need to go. Problem solved – we thought – for about two years.

All of a sudden, in our Slack channel today, (that SEMpdx members can join) members were reporting that they couldnt view the details of Tuesdays upcoming event using Google chrome. Instead of being redirected, They were getting “Wrong Document Context” as the error message, but on a phone you can clearly see why.

 

Wrong Document Context

If you Google “Wrong Document Context” you get nothing very relevant as to why this is happening… seems like this default error message makes no sense. Why not say “The Redirected URL is blocked”?

More imprtant though, is that I want to know WHY this is happening. Is the mere fact that we’re doing a redirect somehow suspicious? There’s nothing in Google Search console that we’ve done anything nefarious. Why is Google stopping us?

Did Wild Apricot get flagged as doing something wrong? I don’t think so, or again, shouldn’t Google Search Console tell me something useful here?

Reading this article did explain that the user could decide to trust the redirect but aside from suggesting that their PC’s had malware, it wasn’t much help.

Try This For Youself in Chrome & Firefox

After a current event is done, we remove the redirects, but I put one back for May, so you can try it for yourself.

Here is the event URL: https://www.sempdx.org/sempdx-events/may-2019-members-appreciation-digital-marketing-consultations/

That URL should redirect you here:  https://sempdx.wildapricot.org/event-3334388

In Firefox it does, but in Chrome it does not.

This is what’s in .htaccess:

redirect 302 /sempdx-events/current-events/may-2019-members-appreciation-digital-marketing-consultations/ https://sempdx.wildapricot.org/event-3334388

Granted, redirecting a page on your site is a rare use, but it’s weird.   Got any ideas?