Hello,
I have recently upgraded my old Joomla 3.x website to Joomla 6.x renewing my subscription to Akeeba Admin Tool and Akeeba Backup. Everything is working fine, however I have found an strange behaviour with the administrator secret url parameter. If I have already used it on a browser it get in some way "cached" and it is not being asked again I can enter the backend panel without putting the ?secret_pass. If I open an incognito window it is working without any problem. I don't remember this to be in the past in that way with Joomla 3.x. I was doubting that as I have the website behind Cloudflare this was also interfering but with the incognito mode check I discard this.
May you please advise on this?.
Thanks and kind regards
Juan LUis
#43315 Is Administrator secret URL parameter being cached??
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Environment Information
Joomla! version
6.1.3
PHP version
8.4.24
Admin Tools version
7.9.2
Latest post by nicholas on Saturday, 05 September 2026 08:02 CDT
Friday, 04 September 2026 17:06 CDT
nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
It's time to give the documentation another read – lots of things have changed in those 6 years. Look under “Browser cookie override for the administrator secret URL parameter”.
As you can see, once you use the secret URL parameter it sets a cookie in your browser which allows you to access /administrator without the secret URL parameter. The documentation goes in great length and depth about why this is implemented, how it works, and the problems it solves for you. This option in the Configure WAF page lets you turn off this feature, if you so wish.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!
Saturday, 05 September 2026 02:45 CDT
juanlux
Thanks Nicholas for your quick answer and please accept my apologies for not catching this. I promise I was trying to locate something in the documentation related but I was not able to do that till you pointed it out. I'm getting older... but thanks to this I have now discovered Panopticon and other extensions such as Onthos and AITiny that I need to test.
Saturday, 05 September 2026 08:02 CDT
nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
No worries! You've been using the Joomla 3 version which last had new features nearly 4 years ago. It makes sense that you did not know this change was made. I am happy to help!
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!