What happened?

Description

The remind form in components/com_users/tmpl/remind/default.php generates a form action URL that incorrectly includes view=remind:

<form action="/inloggen?view=remind&amp;task=remind.remind" method="post">

When a crawler (e.g. Googlebot) follows this form action URL literally as a GET request — which crawlers do, since they do not submit forms — Joomla serves the remind page again with the same form action. Each subsequent request adds another layer of amp; encoding to the URL, resulting in URLs thousands of characters long:

/inloggen?view=remind&...task=remind.remind

This triggers PHP warnings in caching extensions (confirmed with JCH Optimize) that attempt to create filesystem cache entries based on the full URL:

PHP Warning: file_exists(): File name is longer than the maximum allowed path length
on this platform (4096): /home/.../media/com_jchoptimize/cache/html/https/
www.example.nl/inloggen/amp%3Bamp%3Bamp%3B[...]task=remind.remind/index.html
in .../administrator/components/com_jchoptimize/lib/vendor/laminas/laminas-cache/
src/Pattern/CaptureCache.php on line 116

The issue does not require a caching extension to reproduce — it affects any Joomla 6 site with frontend users and a login menu item. The warning is a symptom; the root cause is the incorrect form action URL.

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a Joomla 6 site with a login menu item and frontend users enabled
2. Fetch /inloggen?view=remind (or equivalent SEF URL) and inspect the form action in the HTML source
3. Make a GET request to that form action URL: /inloggen?view=remind&task=remind.remind
4. Inspect the form action on the returned page — it now contains an additional amp; layer: view=remind&task=remind.remind
5. Repeat to observe recursive growth

Expected behaviour

The form action should contain only task=remind.remind, or ideally the task should be passed as a hidden input field and the form action should be a clean URL without any query parameters.

Actual behaviour

Form action rendered in HTML:

action="/inloggen?view=remind&task=remind.remind"

The presence of view=remind in the action is incorrect — it is inherited from the current page's route context and causes a self-referencing URL that grows unbounded when followed repeatedly.

Environment

• Joomla version: 6.1.1 (likely all 6.x versions)
• PHP version: 8.x
• Confirmed via: live site crawled by Googlebot (IP 66.249.74.38)

Related

This exact issue was fixed for the 5.x branch in:

• PR #45619 — [5.3] Fix strict routing for frontend forms (merged 10 August 2025, released in Joomla 5.3.3)

The fix modifies components/com_users/tmpl/remind/default.php (and reset/default.php) by replacing the hardcoded task in the URL with a hidden input field, so the form action becomes a clean URL.

The same fix has not been ported to the 6.x branch. The file components/com_users/tmpl/remind/default.php in Joomla 6.1.1 is identical to the pre-fix version in 5.x.

Additional Comments

No response