I am approaching this one cautiously since I suppose it could be an issue in either Joomla or one of the plugins I'm using.

Steps to reproduce the issue

I have a Category List menu item. The menu item has the category and subcategory descriptions disabled. There are no subcategories in this particular case. The one and only article in this category has an instance of the Simple Image Gallery (SIG) plugin {gallery}folder_path{/gallery} in its introtext section following one line of text. Unless I put the {gallery} tag after a Read More page separator, it's rendering at the Category List level (as if it were in the Category description).

Expected result

Neither of the plugins should get prepared.

Actual result

Of course, there is no gallery at that level (it's in the article), but I am getting two system messages from SIG complaining about the path not existing. The path is constructed using an Articles Anywhere (AA) {article} plugin instance that should only be rendered and will only work when the article is rendered since the AA plugin needs information about the article to create the valid folder_path. The article's introtext preceding the {gallery} tag is not displayed, but it does seem as if the content is being prepared within the (first) article in the category and that is causing the messages. Again, inserting a Read More separator before the {gallery} tag does eliminate the messages, so that's my workaround for now.

System information (as much as possible)

Joomla: 4.3.2
PHP: 8.1.18
DB: 10.6.14-MariaDB
Simple Image Gallery: 4.2 (JoomlaWorks)
Articles Anywhere: 14.0 PRO (Regular Labs)

Additional comments

So, if it's a Joomla issue, which I am inclined to believe, it means that article content preparation is being done when it shouldn't be. I don't see how it could be either plugin (SIG or AA) since those should only be "prepared" if the article gets rendered.