OK, apparently this is some sort of bug or intended behaviour on Joomla's part. The pagination is created by appending ?start=X to the system cached URL. To fix this, you can simply override your template's pagination. I'm gonna show you what we use and then you can adjust yours accordingly.
This is our /templates/TEMPLATE_NAME/html/pagination.php file. If you don't have one in your template's /html folder, simply create a pagination.php file and copy the contents below
<?php
// no direct access
defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access');
function pagination_item_active(&$item)
{
// Filter the URL to only allow for "?start=" [start]
$page = $item->link;
if (strpos($page, '?')!==false) {
$query = explode('?', $page);
$query = $query[1];
if ($query != '') {
if (strpos($query, '&')!==false) {
$page = str_replace('?'.$query, '', $page);
$params = explode('&', $query);
foreach ($params as $param) {
if (substr($param, 0, 6) == 'start=') {
$page = $page.'?'.$param;
}
}
}
}
}
$item->link = $page;
// Filter the URL to only allow for "?start=" [finish]
return '<a href="'.$item->link.'" title="'.$item->text.'"><span>'.$item->text.'</span></a>';
}
function pagination_item_inactive(&$item)
{
return '<span class="active"><span>'.$item->text.'</span></span>';
}
function pagination_list_render($list)
{
$pages = '';
foreach ($list['pages'] as $page) {
$pages .= $page['data'];
}
return '
<div class="pagination">
<span class="start-button">'.$list['start']['data'].'</span>
<span class="prev-button">'.$list['previous']['data'].'</span>
<span class="pages">'.$pages.'</span>
<span class="next-button">'.$list['next']['data'].'</span>
<span class="end-button">'.$list['end']['data'].'</span>
<div class="clr"></div>
</div>
';
}
function pagination_list_footer($list)
{
return '
<div class="list-footer">
<div class="limit">
'.JText::_('Display Num').$list['limitfield'].'
</div>
'.$list['pageslinks'].'
<div class="counter">
'.$list['pagescounter'].'
</div>
<input type="hidden" name="limitstart" value="'.$list['limitstart'].'" />
</div>
';
}
