always the same order in random order

– Are you up to rev ( 5.4.18 )? There was a problem in 5.4.15 .. 5.4.17 regarding this.

– Do NOT use a caching plugin if you want random order not to be frozen!

Hi, I am not using any caching plugin, and I had version 5.4.18 (I just updated to 5.4.19). I have setting table IV C1 set to ‘random’, and in the album settings, photo order also set to ‘random’. Maybe you can see if you have the same result visiting the home page of https://ab-stract-art.com/ , where I have an album slideshow with that configuration. Thanks.

Nice link, but hardly do-able to remember the sequence of the photos… but, never mind.

Now i know you are up to rev: The random sort order is defined by the so called random seed. Whenever the random function is called with the same seed, the same sequence will be the result.

When you have a display of thumbnails, and say you are on page 3 out of 7, and you click on an image to go to the slideshow, the visitor expects to be also on page 3 of the slideshow, viewing the same image, with the same images before and after the current image.

Also, when going back from slideshow to thumbnails, the visitorm exects consistency.

The random seed is generated using the time in seconds starting at 0 on jan 1, 1970, and will be the same after exactly 4721 seconds. This will ‘never’ happen to the visitor.

The random seed – and hence the sequence order – is saved in the wppa session data, that is kept for various reasons, one example: the view counts are incremented only once, even when the visitor looks 3 times at the same slide during his session.
The session duration is set to one hour, so the random seed will be re-generated as soon as the visitor opens a page later the one hour after his first visit; he starts a new session.

Conclusion: the random sequence is changed every hour for a certain visitor, and is always different for different visitors ( as long as they do not start their session in the same second ).

I hope 2 things: 1. you understand why the random seed ( sequence ) is remembered between pageloads, and 2. that you can live with the situation as it is now. If you really want a random seed be different for each page load, i provide a setting for it, but we have already 616 settings and 100 runtime variables…

Thanks for the explanation. Now I understand. I think those are good reasons to keep random order the way you have designed it. Thanks again.

Hi! sorry for getting back on this issue, but as I play a lot with surprise, in my case it would be interesting to have the option to have a random order that changes every time the page is loaded. I always give also a way to access images in an ordered way by creating a gallery page ordered by name, where images appear always in the same order. I use random order so that all images can have an opportunity to be in first places by creating a random page that always look different.
In previous versions of wppa random order changed that way, every page load, even in the same session and user, and that order was kept when changing to thumbnails view or pagination page. I understand that wppa in getting bigger with each new version, with new variables, so that I understand that my case could be too personal and not interesting for other users. I leave this question to your criteria. Thanks.

Will be considered.