Please Wait Before Requesting Another Question

"Please wait before requesting another question."

This message has three quite different causes, and the fastest way to tell them apart is how many people see it.

1. A genuine rate limit

Symptom: one person sees it after pressing Next Question several times quickly, or on a page holding several widgets.

Question generation is limited to 5 per minute per visitor and 15 per minute per IP address. The window resets on the minute, so the wait is never longer than 60 seconds.

Nothing is wrong. If it happens often enough to annoy real visitors, raise the limits — see Rate Limits Explained.

On a page with several widgets this is expected rather than a fault: each widget fetches its own question on load, so six widgets consume six of the five-per-minute allowance immediately and the sixth shows this message. Either use one widget per page, or raise the per-visitor limit above the number of widgets.

2. Everyone sees it, on a site with no traffic

Symptom: the message appears for every visitor, every time, including the very first request after a fresh page load. Raising the limits changes nothing.

This is almost certainly the missing rate-limit table.

The plugin creates one table on activation to hold rate-limit counters. If it is absent, the limiter cannot record a request, and it fails closed on purpose — refusing traffic rather than leaving a public endpoint uncapped. The visible result is a permanent wait message.

The table goes missing when:

• the plugin files were copied into place and never activated through WordPress
• a database was restored from a backup that excluded it
• a site was migrated with a tool that skipped unknown tables
• the plugin is active on a multisite subsite where activation never ran properly

The fix: deactivate the plugin and activate it again. Activation recreates the table. Your settings are stored separately and are not affected.

To confirm before or after, look for a table named ai_fq_rate_limits with your site's prefix — typically wp_ai_fq_rate_limits.

3. Everyone sees it, and the site is behind a CDN

Symptom: the site works when you test it, then most visitors see the message once there is real traffic. Your site sits behind Cloudflare, a load balancer, or another reverse proxy.

Behind a proxy, every request appears to come from the proxy's address, so all your visitors share a single per-IP allowance of 15 generations a minute. The sixteenth person in any minute is refused.

The fix is to tell the plugin the real visitor address with the ai_fq_client_ip filter — with the important caveat that you must only trust a forwarded header if a proxy you control actually sets it. Full instructions and the security reasoning: Running Behind Cloudflare or a CDN.

Telling them apart quickly

Question	If yes
Does it clear within a minute for one person?	Cause 1 — normal rate limiting
Does everyone see it on an idle site?	Cause 2 — missing table
Are you behind Cloudflare or a proxy?	Cause 3 — shared IP
Are there several widgets on the page?	Cause 1 — expected, raise the limit

What it is not

It is not a provider problem. This message is generated entirely by your own server, before any AI call is attempted, so it means nothing about your credentials, your credit balance, or whether the provider is up. Provider failures produce "The AI service is temporarily unavailable" instead.