Last Updated on: 23rd May 2022, 02:03 pm
On the blog, we have a related posts plugin. It is supposed to find posts related to what you just read. But for a few weeks, it’s been horking up complete and utter randomness, or so I thought. Although it’s amusing what it brings up, it’s not exactly doing it’s job to the best of its ability.
Then one day, I posted about doing rapid tests, and looked at the related posts that came up. one of them was a post about Wordle, in fact it was my first post about Wordle. Because I’m weird, I remembered that either just before or just after that one, I posted the Aira rapid test tip sheet. And so a theory was born. Maybe somehow, something screwed up how the related posts thingamabob links to posts. Maybe it links by post ID’s, and now it’s one ID off.
To see if I was right, I went to the Wordle post, went down to the previous and next posts. What was the next post? The Aira tip sheet! I sometimes love having a freakish memory. It helps me solve mysteries!
But the bigger mystery is how to fix it! It wasn’t a plugin update that broke it. Was it a PHP update? Something in the database? So we have no idea how to fix it and don’t want to break bigger things trying. So until we figure out an easy fix, I hope this post will help. If you’re really interested in what the related posts are, click on the posts it links to under the “related posts” heading, and then hit the link to the next post under the post navigation heading and voila! But if anyone has any ideas on how to fix it, I’m all ears. Hopefully it’s easy. I don’t like breaky smashy.
You have an amazing memory. You’ve also put much more thought into this strangeness than I have, which says a lot about how this place works since I’m the guy what does all the tinkering, hahaha.
My best guesses are the PHP upgrade I did a few weeks back, or possibly the STCR plugin that handles the comment notifications. That thing is full of weird gremlins. When I first put it in it failed to properly initialize its database tables, but it didn’t do it in a super obvious way. So it appeared to be working until it smacked me in the head with its lack of working. then there was the recent update that added a new option that, as written, should not have mattered at all to me. But I was informed that it did matter by the disappearance of the site’s entire sidebar. That was a strange one, because the box I had to check had nothing to do with sidebars, especially so because it’s a frigging commenting plugin.
So long story short, the conflict could be anywhere, and because the related posts being random is kind of a sneaky issue at first because sometimes it’s hard to relate thousands of things to each other and oddness happens, it’s hard to pinpoint when exactly it began. AT some point maybe I’ll look around on the support forums and perhaps ask our friend Google about it, but who knows. It’s not exactly mission critical. It’s just perplexing.
But like Carin said, if you really care that much, there’s a way to figure out what YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) was trying to do. And if you don’t care that much, have fun with the randomness. As long as you’re reading, it’s good.
It looks like it’s only broken from February 22 of this year on. Totally weird!