[Plugin: FourSquareAPI] FourSquare API – venues shortcode broken, and breaks other areas

This has gone unresolved for many weeks and months now – so I need to finally uninstall and resign myself that this wonderful plugin is broken and unsupported.

I have tried to report this problem several times.

when I try to use the foursquare_venues shortcode – whether

[foursquare_venues]
or
[foursquare_venues type=checkins width=330 map_height=300 map_zoom=9 timestamp=1 address=1 stats=1 limit=6 list=0 autoscroll=1600 id=44]

99% of the time I get a blank page (meaning nothing appears in the expected post/page area) AND subsequent pages and menus get affected! (seems like there is some sort of broken code somewhere in the plugin.

NOW THEN – this does NOT happen if I go to the foursquareapi SETUP and refresh the cache.

THEN the plugin works and displays as expected! (and there are no problems elsewhere on my site)

BUT after a few minutes or hours, the cache apparently ‘expires’ (despite choosing ‘never’)
once the cache expires … foursqureapi is broken and proceeds to break other areass of my site (just the venues shortcode – the badges shortcode works fine!)

I have tested and tested, removed plugins, updated, begged and pleaded with the author.

Conclusion.
This wonderful plugin is broken, unsupported and dead.

(which is odd – because the author was fantastic many months ago in helping to debug other issues – and rapidly released fixes as I discovered other issues – but now he is silent … hope he is OK)

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/foursquareapi/