Loading issue with "popular plugin" tab - twice the same page.

[NekoJonez]

Quite often when I scroll through the "popular" section of the plugin page, I get duplicate pages. As in, two pages that are the EXACT same.

At the moment of writing, I started at page 1470 out of 1470 and went back using the arrows. Page 1468 and 1469 duplicated.

I thought this was a cache issue, so I cleaned my cache... And the problem came back.
I thought it was a browser enigne issue so I switched from Opera (Chromium) to Firefox (Gecko) and still found the same issue.

On same pages, sadly I can't give an example but I often notice that the first two or three plugins of the list are the same as the last two on the previous page....

[NekoJonez]

Replying to SergeyBiryukov:
Thx for doing that. I must have looked over the component Plugins. :o

[NekoJonez]

I just tested it for WordPress 5.7 and it's still happening.

[hbhalodia]

Hi @NekoJonez @SergeyBiryukov,

Upon further investigation, it appears that the issue lies with the Plugins API itself, as it is returning the same results across specific pages.

For example, when directly calling this URL in the browser:

​http://api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.2/?action=query_plugins&request[page]=1535&request[per_page]=36&request[locale]=en_US&request[browse]=popular&request[wp_version]=6.8

the requested page is 1535, but the API response is:

{
    "info": {
        "page": 999,
        "pages": 1540,
        "results": 55414
    },
    "plugins": [
        {...}
    ]
}

Here, the API returns info->page as 999 instead of 1535. This suggests that the API's handling of requests for popular plugins may not be functioning as intended.

Additionally, the results remain the same for pages from 999 up to around 1530, which should not be the case if pagination were working correctly.

To resolve this issue, we will need to address the API's output to ensure it returns accurate pagination details and results.

Edit: I checked with postman, incognito mode, insomania and for same request data each time with different page numbers produced the different results which is quite strange.

Thank you.