Updated Site Zones and AAM - Now Social features URLs are wrong... Sometimes?

Question

So we just deployed the following SharePoint sites into production with the default site extended to the Extranet zone as followed:
Default - https://share.domain.com:444 - NTLM Auth
Extranet - https://share.domain.com - ADFS\SAML Claims Auth
Default - https://my.domain.com:444 - NTLM Auth
Extranet - https://my.domain.com - ADFS\SAML Claims
Default - https://search.domain.com:444 - NTLM Auth
Extranet - https://search.domain.com - ADFS\SAML Claims
The default zone is used for search only while all users access SharePoint through the Extranet zone. Search works fine when looking for documents and people. My issues start showing up in the social features. 
For instance, if I click on the "Sites" link in the top bar I see the sites I follow along with the suggested sites. The URLs for the sites I follow are correct. However, the Suggested Sites all return the Default Zone URL. When I follow a document
or site however, the URL is always of the Default zone in my activity feed. Alerts for new content use the Default zone in the email; yet alerts for sharing approval use the correct Extranet zone. To top it off if I search for anything on any of
the sites, the URLs are correct for the zone I am in. Now here is the real crazy part. We have the same configuration in a Test domain deployment and everything works perfectly!?
Any ideas? The only thing different is that production goes through an F5 for both internal and external access. While test goes through a reverse proxy for external access and internal access goes straight to the WFE server.

Answer 1

Hi Nick,
For the Suggested Sites, we need to click the fresh button to fresh the sites, and then the URL for the sites will display with the corresponding zone URL.
For the alerts, it is a known issue in SharePoint.
The Immediate Alerts are sent based on the SiteURL column stored in the ImmedSubScriptions table of the content database.
This means that the alerts are sent based on the URL the user used when the subscription was made.
As a workaround so far, we need to add the zone for external users to the zone that allows cross firewall access.
https://bcplanning-public.sharepoint.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=279
http://sureshpydi.blogspot.com/2013/07/sharepoint-2013-configure-external.html
However, this workaround does not apply to Newsfeed notification emails.
Best regards.
Thanks
TechNet Community Support
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