Troubleshooting Double Encoding issues

When using Jetpack to connect your site to third-party apps like WordPress.com for Google Docs, you may run into a “Double Encoding” error.

This may happen if your site uses HTTPS, and if your hosting company is “double-encoding” some of the values being passed. To test this, go to http://yoursite.com/?%40 (change yoursite.com to the URL of your WordPress site). If your browser changes the URL to https://yoursite.com/?%2540 (note that ?%40 changed to ?%2540), you’ll need to contact your hosting company.

Possible causes and solutions:

• Do you have the Really Simple SSL plugin installed and are using Apache? Try disabling the plugin to see if the problem goes away. If it does then the plugin may have misconfigured your Apache .htaccess file. If you see the following lines:

  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

  Then changing the last line to include NE fixes the issue:

  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NE]

• Using Apache? Check your .htaccess file for a http to https redirect – this may be causing the problem, and you may be able to fix it with NE as described above for Really Simple SSL
• Using Nginx? Check your server config’s http to https redirect
• Unsure what your server is, or you have no access to your server configuration? Contact your hosting provider with an example of the misconfigured redirect and ask them to fix it