They broke it.

Thanks for your feedback about the randomized sorting and sorry to see you disappointed, rainbowprophet! If you really need the randomized sorting option, you can still use it!

We added an explanation here on the decision behind the feature removal from the core functionality of the plugin – it’s something we did after careful thinking and judgement:

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/woocommerce-extra-product-sorting-options/other_notes/

you can still use the randomized sorting as detailed in those notes’ links

we really wanted the plugin not to cause troubles for the majority of users with larger catalogs or less powerful servers, while still making it possible for users adopting this feature to make it work for them via customization (https://gist.github.com/bekarice/bac8b67064001ebc3bc2475424d99f87)

we would be really happy if you’d consider giving the plugin another try with the custom snippet!

Cheers

Fulvio

Thanks for your reply, guys! I do understand that others were having issues, but not understanding completely how that worked I can only wonder: if they were having problems with the random sorting, why not just turn off the random sorting? I’m not good at finding the code and adding snippets, so this still leaves me out. But I understand the decision.

if they were having problems with the random sorting, why not just turn off the random sorting?

This was the main crux of the issue. Having random sorting there in the first place implied it will work for anyone using the plugin, which was not the case, and provided a poor experience for many merchants, especially those just installing the plugin. This caused considerable frustration, emails, and support requests, for which the only solution is, “yes the setting is there, but you shouldn’t turn it on because to do it right requires a different structure that WooCommerce filters allow so not sure why we have it there but sorry”. ??

If a feature is only going to work for some stores, it should be a snippet for those stores, rather than having it available but unusable as a setting for most. This was a poor decision on my part when the plugin was built, and unfortunately correcting that poor decision means that there will be some stores who are affected negatively by this.

We absolutely appreciate your understanding and feedback here, and I’m sorry again this affected you. If you’d like to continue to use random sorting with a snippet, I recommend the Code Snippets plugin, and tutorial on adding code here for beginners.

Cheers, Beka