Recent adverts, only showing three adverts
 

http://www.arniesairsoft.co.uk/classifieds/index.php

As you can see the recent adverts block is only showing three ads. I 'think' that the other two it would have shown are now closed or something. It's something wierd like the adverts it wanted to display are either ended or removed.

Any ideas?

The recent ads if your not showing ads with no images are only going to show ads with images and not expired

also check cat permissions also

Cat permissions?

If you check the list here of recent adverts you'll see what I suspect:

http://www.arniesairsoft.co.uk/class...at=all&ppuser=

One of the most recent items is sold. I think this means that it's not shown in the recent adverts bar, and hence only 4 shown there at the moment, instead of the 5 it's set to.

Your only going to show active ads yes not expired or sold

Display ads with no photos in features? is set to NO (in admin options)
Number of days to show sold/closed ads? is set to 7 (in show ads options)

I can't see any other setting that might be relevant.

I can't see any settings in catpermissions? I presume you mean "Usergroup Access Permissions" in "edit category" ?

The number of of days to show sold ads makes no difference to the recent blocks thats a setting for showcat page

The recent ad block will only show with the way your setting it ads which have photos and that are not expired or sold. It has always been this way

Thanks I think I understand what you're saying.

What I was suggesting was that if of the 5 recent adverts one or more of them are expired or sold, it should show the next one in it's place rather than not showing them at all and only filling (for example) 3 out of 5 spaces.

Just like Photopost or the rest of the programs we only grab say ten more ads than your number you want to show as a permformance measure so your not scanning the entire table for ads you have permission to view

Are you saying that you only look at a few of the last ads, and if none of them contains images the recent blocks will be empty?

If you do not have permission to view the files or you elect not to show ads with no images sure thats exactly what I am saying. Say you elect to show 4 images then we check the last 14 products on a recent ad block. If its a random block we take 14 random ads and then run permissions etc against them

Ok, that explains what why our recent block is never filled up..
Hope you will concider changing this procedure so that the number you select in Number of products to display in the most recent additions section? is always filled up.

Something like that would be extremely inefficient if we do not limit the query like cause it could end up scanning thousands of products and slow down the software.

Cant you keep the last ads with images in a table, updated every time a forsale-type ad is added/deleted?
At the moment, only 2 out of our 7 columns contains an ad image and users have started to send me mail asking why their ad is not displayed....
Also I noticed that if I go to the sale category all 7 are filled up.
So it would be an improvement if you "grab" only for-sale ads when generating the thumbs for the main page

You can make suggestions in our suggestions forum but the way it is currently done is the maximum efficient way of doing things. We grab a set number of mysql results and then filter permissions.