Plug-in stopped working

Hi @chefdennis,

It seems you have a configuration issue over there:

1. You have Data Sampling enabled on your website. Make sure you have configured it properly according to your current traffic levels: What is Sample Rate for?
2. It seems you’re also using the Data Caching feature as well. How often did you set the cache to be “refreshed”?

I just sent this to my team and they sent a screenshot of our settings, which seem to be correct.

Thanks @chefdennis. A Sample Rate of 100 is recommended for websites with 125,000 to 250,000 visits per day. Is that your case?

Additionally, please share a screenshot of the settings you’re using with the widget (Appearance > Widgets > [Your Sidebar Name] > WordPress Popular Posts.)

my traffic is between 20,000 and 30,000 per day this time of year. It never gets that high but will double later in Q4.

here is a screenshot of my settings

sorry here is the screen shot

my traffic is between 20,000 and 30,000 per day this time of year. It never gets that high but will double later in Q4.

In that case @chefdennis you’ll want to adjust your Sampling Rate to a lower value like 24-30 instead of 100 -as suggested on the link I shared earlier- and then readjust the Sample Rate again once your traffic changes.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to be manually adjusting the Sample Rate every time your traffic changes, you may want to consider using the Pageviews Cache instead of Data Sampling.

Also, consider decreasing the amount of time WPP keeps data on cache. Right now you/your team set it up so it expires every 12 hours which with your current traffic levels is a bit excessive (which actually makes me think that I should change that functionality to stop people from doing this for their own sake). 1 hour or less should be good enough for performance in your case:

1. Go to Settings > WordPress Popular Posts > Tools.
2. Under Data, set Refresh cache every to 1 hour.
3. Click on the Apply button that’s right below to save changes.

By the way, right now there’s one popular post being listed under your Most Popular Posts section which leads me to believe that the issue is indeed caused by not using the right Data Sampling configuration for your site:

we made the changes and have seen no change on my website.

Also the Tangerine Beef that is showing up without a thumbnail isn’t one of my top posts.

we made the changes and have seen no change on my website.

What exactly were the changes, @chefdennis?

Also the Tangerine Beef that is showing up without a thumbnail isn’t one of my top posts.

Well, thumbnails are not enabled:

Also, if Data Caching is still enabled keep in mind that:

(…) when someone checks any of your posts and pages, your popular posts list won’t be updated right away (eg. if you set the plugin to cache the data for one week then your popular posts list won’t be updated for a week.)

The plugin will use the cached data to build and display your popular posts list. Once the cached data expires, WPP will query the database again to retrieve the updated popular posts data, refresh the data cache and build the new popular posts list.

So if you configure your data cache to last for 12 hours then your popular posts list won’t update for 12 hours, meaning that what you see on your website won’t necessarily match what the plugin is reporting on the admin dashboard as that’s “live” data.

set the sampling rate to 30 and refresh cache to 1 hour. those were the changes you suggested.

And thumbnails are set to featured image

set the sampling rate to 30 and refresh cache to 1 hour. those were the changes you suggested.

Alright, in that case your popular posts list will update roughly every hour so it should be more dynamic now. Let’s wait and see.

And thumbnails are set to featured image

Please re-read my previous reply and have a look at the screenshot I shared there, @chefdennis.

thanks I missed that about the thumbnail. I’ve got that set up now.

We made the changes to the sampling and cache 2+ hours ago. How long will it be before we see changes?

Changes should be reflected right away if you have some traffic right now. Let’s try something else: please disable the Data Caching feature for a moment (Settings > WordPress Popular Posts > Tools, under Data, set Data Caching to Disabled and click on Apply to save changes) and leave a comment here when you’re done so I can have a look.

I just changed the Data Caching to Never Cache, I didn’t have disable. It looks like I have another post showing up, but again its not one of my popular posts.

there are 60-70 people on my site right now

According to the settings screenshot you shared above the widget should be displaying up to the top 3 most popular posts from the past 7 days (unless you guys changed these settings recently?) and if you have had traffic these days you should definitely see three posts there but only two are showing which is quite odd.

Could you please share a screenshot of your Debug screen? (Settings > WordPress Popular Posts, click on the Debug link at the top center of the screen.)