Update on Ratings System 2/17
Update 3/1: I’ve made a possible fix. I will be monitoring any incoming ratings to see how things look, but if you CAN rate now, please comment here and let me know that it’s working for you! Likewise, if you still cannot rate (make sure to clear your cache, just in case), please let me know in this comments section as well. Thank you! Hi! I wanted to let everyone know what has been going on wrt the ratings issue. My web host and I have been working on trying to figure out the issue with the ratings plugin. I think we finally figured out what was separating the people who could rate from the masses who couldn’t, though figuring out WHY this problem was happening was something that neither of us could understand. Basically, it has something to do with the CDN we use – we think. Figuring out why just this ONE plugin is unable to play nice with the CDN while all others can function properly would be the next step in solving the issue, unfortunately… The plugin dev released an upgrade to the plugin this week. I wanted to try this out and see if it helped our situation at all, but instead now the plugin breaks the entire website and sends us into a 500 error where NO PART of the site is accessible. I’ve tried re-installing it from scratch, but as soon as the plugin exists once again on the server – not even active, just present on the server – it takes the site offline. I think you all can agree that for now, it’s best to just keep it off the server entirely for now. I will be submitting a ticket and asking the dev if he can figure out why this is happening. But to be frank with you guys, after looking at the tone of responses on his support forum (of course, not visible until after you pay for the plugin – sigh), I do not have much faith, especially as I can’t even have the plugin on the server to test things for him right now. My web host also seems to be at the end of the rope for support they are capable/willing to offer on this specific issue. So if he is no help and the plugin continues to just brick the site whenever I try to re-install it, the worst case situation is that we will have to start the ratings over from scratch. I really didn’t want to do that, but we were between a rock and a hard place: the old ratings plugin was SO bloated that it was making the site run like shit and would sometimes manage to knock the site offline if we had heavy traffic. I was having to restart services daily because of the ratings plugin, specifically, overloading. So I paid for a license of the “new” and “pro” (read: more import functions and, ostensibly, support) version of that plugin, which was also the only ratings plugin that I could find that would allow us to import 8 years of ratings data from the old plugin. Since this new plugin seems to be a massive failure, in that it doesn’t actually allow anyone but 3-4 people to see the ratings block no and now it can’t even be present on the server without causing 500 errors, we may unfortunately be faced with the fact that A) I wasted a bunch of money trying to preserve the old ratings and B) we will have to reset ratings from scratch with an entirely new ratings plugin. I just wanted to let you guys know what was going on and give a warning that, at this point, I am completely at a loss and unless the plugin dev can come up with a magical save that both makes his plugin stop nuking the site AND makes the ratings block actually display for more than 1% of the site’s userbase, we are going to be starting from square one with regards to ratings. This isn’t the end that I wanted for the ratings plugin, but I’m sorry to say that I think it’s just what we’re going to have to deal with as the endgame. I know that many of you already think I’m a useless, lazy piece of shit for taking this long (yeah, thanks for those messages by the way – I really appreciate how so many of you had the time to message me and tell me to kill myself or that it’s been “too long” but those same people NEVER provided any helpful information about the bug themselves), so I’m sure that this will just confirm that for you. Perhaps you’re all right, but unfortunately, at this point I’m all there is and I have no clue how to fix this problem. I’m sorry. My priority is that by the end of the week, either we will magically have the ratings system fixed, or (looking much more likely at this point), we will be using an entirely new ratings system and the community will have to help rebuild the ratings data that we lost. Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.