Question

My website relies completely on a random page generator that loads a page from a text file list. The code was kindly written by “lserni” on the forum. The script has been working perfectly the last few days, and it’s happily processed over 100,000 page views in 3 days!

I noticed today however that it seems to have stopped working properly. If you are a brand new visitor to the page, or you’ve cleared your internet cache/cookies etc – When you load the page for the first time, it doesn’t randomly generate a page.. it just shows a BLANK page. If you then refresh the page, the script works perfectly. I just can’t get my head round it, but it’s now resulted in a large drop in traffic! Hope you can help:

    <?php

    session_start();
    if (!isset($_SESSION['urlist']))       // Do we know the user?
        $_SESSION['urlist'] = array();     // No, start with empty list
    if (empty($_SESSION['urlist']))        // Is the list empty?
    {
        $_SESSION['urlist'] = file("linklist.txt");   // Fill it.
        $safe = array_pop($_SESSION['urlist']);
        shuffle($_SESSION['urlist']);           // Shuffle the list
        array_push($_SESSION['urlist'], $safe);
    }
    $url = trim(array_pop($_SESSION['urlist']));
    header("Location: $url");
    ?>

Answer 1

It’s actually the LAST item in the file that’s used first if there is no session data.

{
    $safe = array_pop($_SESSION['urlist']); // gets item at the END of the array
    shuffle($_SESSION['urlist']);
    array_push($_SESSION['urlist'], $safe); // puts item at the END of the array
}
$url = trim(array_pop($_SESSION['urlist']));// gets item at the END of the array

So if you introduced a newline in your textfile at the end, it may be your issue.