by JetBoy
There’s been an unfortunate development to mark the new year at Juicy Secrets: our ratings meter has been shut down, and all the ratings numbers have vanished with it.
This sorry saga began when Amanda noticed the site was taking a long, long time to function. Delving into the wheels and gears, it was quickly established that the ratings widget was our culprit. The plugin’s site wasn’t responding, which meant that our site was contacting theirs until it timed out, hence the delay.
Upon visiting the plugin’s home page, this message was found: “This plugin has been closed as of December 25, 2025 and is not available for download. This closure is permanent.” And since all the ratings were stored on their servers, their demise means we’re unable to access that data.
What can I say? In order to function, Juicy Secrets has to rely on outside sources to present our efforts to you, our public. Inevitably, problems will occasionally arise with the services we get from some of those outsiders. Those of you who have been with us from the start will recall how we’ve been booted off two different platforms for our content (one of whom literally changed their own rules to justify it). In this case, we can’t even say why it happened. I suppose the plugin wasn’t making enough cold, hard cash for whoever owned it.
Anyhow, the damage is done. My regrets to all you authors, past and present, who put a great value on your ratings. We are seeking out a replacement plugin, and hope to have it installed and working within the next couple of weeks. You’ll be kept up to date.
UPDATE: Most of you have no doubt noticed that we have a shiny new plugin to replace the old. A strong advantage of this new one is that we have a personal copy of the data entered, so the ratings won’t get lost again. There’s still a breakdown of the votes themselves, too… just hover over the three vertical lines to the right of the line of hearts.
There’s another new development you may have noticed. We added a meter at the top of every post to show how many visits each one has had. In the process, we made a startling discovery that’s good in a way; bad in another. First the good: turns out that we’re getting a lot more visitors than we thought. I was stunned to see that the latest installment of “Ripples,” a 45-chapter-and-counting saga that’s been in progress for over seven years — hardly the place to take a casual look, right? — has been checked out over eight hundred times in the last couple of weeks. And 185 visitors went back to visit Chapter One! Can’t claim to have seen that coming!
The bad news: we knew only a bare minority of those visitors were leaving ratings or (especially) comments, but did not know how few there really were. Crunching the numbers, it seems about 2.5% of people leave ratings, and not even half a percent actually comment. Sad. Granted, not every view necessarily comes from a different person, so those percentages could be slightly higher, but still. Which makes those who do share their thoughts and opinions part of something truly special, hint hint.
Speaking of which, our having lost all the old rating numbers makes it important for you, the hoi polloi of Juicy Secrets, to leave ratings for older stories that you have feelings or opinions about, whether pro or con. Please endeavor to make a point of clicking on one of those five heart emojis whenever you read anything here. Let’s get those numbers cooking again!
Yrs, JetBoy