Stats Classics: How to set?
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I generally don’t bother to come over here and count on everyone else to complain when stupid crap happens like this new format.
It has somehow changed the way moderated comments worked and caused half of my regular commenters to be constantly moderated unless I remove all moderation traps. I have well over a million views a month and this can be very annoying.I use my stats page to pull shortcuts to hand post on twitter. When I right click on the top posts in the new format, there is no copy shortcut option.
The global map on the new format is horrid. I don’t know if it is the color scheme or what but you can’t really see the other countries lit up like you can on the regular format.
You have to scroll way too much on the new format when most of the pertinent info was side by side on the old format.
I stay on WP rather than self hosting and handling my own ads simply because I am lazy and liked the ease of doing business here. With the new rollout It is starting to look like time for me to move.
Rather than fix things that are not broken, you should be trying to provide us a way to block commenters by email and post video from places that are not youtubes. And yes, I know there is a video option. That is just kind of ridiculous. Plenty of sites offer codes for other free blogging sites.
It’s nearly impossible to moderate trolls without affecting other users.
There are plenty of things you could have fixed without fucking up all the things that worked well.
Tamaratattles.com
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There are some pretty serious bloggers now chipping in with definite and detailed complaints. I would think that WP should be lending them an ear. It seems that either we have a programming team who are very young and heavily into the twitter “brevity” Or someone doesn’t want to man up to a few mistakes. We also know where both positions have impacted many businesses in the past. After a few months or a year, things quietly revert to the status quo … but unfortunately in many cases, the damage has already been done. And that damage includes the discontent and mistrust which has been fostered among customers.
No one likes to be dangled on a strintg of uncertainties. Six months ago I walked out of a job I’ve loved for 25 years over exactly the same issue. A reluctance from the management to commit to giving the employees a concrete and definite plan for future development. Today the company is running with incompetant “newbies” and temporary hires and is sinking by the day. I am torn between sadness and a feeling of vindication.
The problem have been clearly stated and are indisputable. The most glaringly obvious to anyone remotely familiar with web design is the excessive required SCROLLING. This is beyond irritating.
And the second is WP’s apparent intransigence regarding the very logical solution … which is to allow us a choice.If WP is going to pander to “tweeters” with 140 allowable characters … then two platforms are crucial … one for those of us who are professional writers and who obviously don’t type with their thumbs on an I phone or wrestle with an IPad. And the other for those whose literary efforts don’t extend beyond tweets.
WP would be advised to consider ALL branches of their market and to take stock of the serious writers who are using this once excellent program. And to deal with us and our complaints in a more conscientious way.
Which would be to answer a basic question. If simply offering two choices would solve the problems, why is this not being implemented?
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With all due respect, designsimply….this statement makes no sense. The comments here are from people who have used both the old and the new stats pages, and prefer the old.
My apologies, fionamcquarrie. I’m sure I could have worded that better.
“Too much scrolling”
Thanks for adding your voice, nikkitytom. I’ve added your note about scrolling to the feedback I have been collecting.
Despite reassurances by WP that views on this forum are being taken into consideration, there seems to be an overall feeling amongst writers here that the call for a return to the original way of doing things is falling on deaf ears.
blodge1, changes are going to take some time. The goal is to improve the new stats page, and the feedback here is one part of the decision making process. I understand that you are frustrated, and I’m sorry about that! I will do my best to make sure all the feedback is collected, sorted, and heard. The numbers of replies in longer threads can be misleading because several people comment many times over with the same feedback, so I try to only include each feedback once per person to get the best picture I can.
freddiearpsblogs, the request is to stay positive with the critical feedback, not to give positive feedback only. We make that request because sometimes people get out of hand with personal insults otherwise—we would like to avoid that and keep our forums civil and productive. The critical feedback is fine. Constructive criticism is good to hear, and I’m working to help keep track of it.
valerynorth, sorry you’re angry! Thanks for including your voice in the feedback.
jontobey, you make some good points, especially about mobile first. This is something that will be worked on—but updates won’t happen immediately, and the older stats pages will be available in the mean time.
Since this morning all the functions related to stats by fixed pc doesn’t work
stefanomassa, my apologies for not seeing your comment earlier. If you’re still having trouble, can you please start a new help request and make sure to include details about your browser version and which version of Windows you are using?
alwaysjan, thanks for adding your feedback. Your note about seeing “NOTHING PUBLISHED” as the first line beneath stats is a good point, and I don’t remember anyone else saying that before in the feedback so far. I made sure to note it.
In Daily stats Classic, I got to see a whole month of daily stats, with views and visitors both IN THE GRAPH (visual), and in writing.
allegedlyapparent, this is a planned update. I’m not sure on the ETA though!
Given all the recent downgrades, is anyone considering a different blogging platform and if so, what do you recommend?
barbiereject, so sorry you’re frustrated! I think a self-hosted WordPress setup is a good choice if you would like to have more control over the code and how/whether/when things get updated. There are some recommended hosts at http://get.wp.com/hosting/ for anyone who is interested. I would love to have you stay on WordPress.com but also understand if you would like to make a switch to WordPress.org to get more control since that’s one of the tradeoffs between the two different types of setups.
lrhodes4 and geoffwhaley, it’s a planned update to add back the all-time summary view.
Also, I have often used the search feature that used to reside on the black menu bar on the far right. What did you do with that? Bring it back to the menu bar, please.
pixilated2, that search bar in the gray toolbar was removed and there are not plans to add it back.
I imagine this has been mentioned, but I notice that I can’t select text to copy and paste somewhere else. Sometimes I like to grab search terms and paste them into a search box. It’s easy to do with the classic layout on my android phone or in Firefox. For some reason text throughout the new stats seems to be copy-proof.
yoursumbuddy, I will look into this. It would help me if you also made a separate help request for just this issue because it is very specific and different from the other feedback posted in this thread so far.
Designsimply has repeatedly said that the old stats page would be phased out, though she didn’t have a time frame for it.
Yes, I think it will be phased out eventually, and I am not sure of the time frame. Sorry I don’t have anything more specific on that for you!
Hi, rather than moan, I’d just like to know when you’re bringing back;
* All time stats
* Views in syndication
* Full breakdowns of views for each post
* Social media statistics
* A nice full screen view for larger devicesbenjaminallanwyncottgroom, from your list, I know that the all-time summary view is a planned update. I’m not sure on syndication, but I will try to find out. By “Full breakdowns of views for each post” do you mean the all-time graph per post that looks like this in the older stats page? https://cloudup.com/cDbaqoPfXoR About “social media statistics”, the number of followers for your social media should be there in the new stats page if your blog is connected correctly via the Settings > Sharing page (this should be the same as it was in the past). For this, “A nice full screen view for larger devices,” there are planned updates but I am not sure how long they will take to implement—the updates will be small changes over time.
Sorry for the long update! I am just catching up with this thread again.
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The new stats page is entirely blank on all of my iPad browsers. I’m glad somebody here posted a link to the old-style page.
yellopig, I just tested https://wordpress.com/stats/ and https://wordpress.com/stats/example.wordpress.com with Safari on iOS 8.1.2 and the stats page is working for me. Can you confirm the URL you’re using so I can take a closer look? You mentioned the problem is happening for you on all of your iPad browsers—is Safari one that you checked by any chance? Also, are you having trouble with other pages at https://wordpress.com/ or just the stats page?
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I use my stats page to pull shortcuts to hand post on twitter. When I right click on the top posts in the new format, there is no copy shortcut option.
tamaratattles, thank you for your feedback. I will look into the right-click issue later today and report back what I find. I have also made notes about your other feedback to include in what I have collected from the rest of this thread so far.
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Six months ago I walked out of a job I’ve loved for 25 years over exactly the same issue. A reluctance from the management to commit to giving the employees a concrete and definite plan for future development.
Completely aside from the rest of the thread, I was just curious if you blogged about this? Sounds like an interesting situation and I would read about it if you wrote about it.
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Thanks for your reply. I’ll hold my judgement a while and await the finished changes.
Thanks for your reply, and my apologies for any grumpiness- I just like it when stuff works! Cheers
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Designsimply,
Based on your handle, I am going to imagine that you have some sort of personal commitment to minimalism in design. That’s wonderful. I am one of the first people to appreciate efficiency and avoid waste. I own a cellphone that is over ten years old. I own a well-maintained vehicle that is eighteen years old. I do not own a television, and have not watched TV programming except rarely since I gave it up in 1989. At the same time, I am not a technophobe. I have been working with computers and supporting IT infrastructure for more than twenty-five years.
I’m an outlier, but my own dedication to keeping my life as simple as possible makes me respectful of your attitude, provided that your handle here represents that attitude.
Professionally speaking, simplicity can only go so far before it begins to impact function. After function starts to be impacted, additional simplicity only degrades function. It’s like an event horizon. Once you simplify things too much, everything collapses. That’s what WP is approaching now, for desktop and laptop users.
You simply cannot have a single GUI platform to optimize for both users on handheld devices and users with laptops and desktops.
Based on your responses here, I am beginning to wonder if you are able to consider this discussion objectively, or if you have already made up your mind and don’t plan on listening to us, no matter what we say, so this is the last post I will make on this matter.
Give us a choice:
1) For handheld devices, continue your development.
2) Roll back the downgrades for laptop and desktop users and allow us to use the interface as it existed in late 2013.Here are my three WordPress sites that will be going somewhere else if WP refuses to stop degrading the interface for laptop and desktop users.
https://farmerbob1.wordpress.com/
(Currently unpaid. It was paid when I was writing it.)
https://rejecthero.wordpress.com/
(Currently paid)
https://setinstonestory.wordpress.com/
(New Project. Not yet paid. Waiting to see what WP does.) -
Aloha Designsimply … my blogs cover music teaching and my own compositions. I have one technical site dealing with GIMP tweaks and another featuring my digital graphics. The fifth “inspirational one” covers my years in India and stories of a most unusual childhood. There’s no spot for this sad tale.
In short a major Waikiki hotel held employee meetings for ten years … each one containing a looming project for massive renovations requiring a two-year shut down and “re-organization” afterwards. We have enormous patience here in Hawaii but after ten years of this, gradually the top employees drifted away to other jobs. Today the staff is mainly new hires and temps. The indecision finally began to impact our tourist base and bookings slowed. What was once a hub of activity and positivity is now a bleak and cheerless venue. It breaks my heart to walk by. So far only a lobby repair which stripped it of all Hawaiian touches. No more pretty muu muu uniforms or lei. No more ukuleles or impromptu hula and a genuine craft program replaced with vendors selling cheap trinkets from China. Most of the old employees have retired or are in other jobs.
All in the name of “upgrading” and “modernization”… and the unique reasons for choosing the hotel are now gone. It’s now reflected in plunging occupancy and bookings. News travels fast. Now it’s clear that an error was made and it’s too late to rectify it.
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Your story resonates deeply with me. I’ve written about poorly implemented “innovation” earlier in this thread; more directly, your experience reminds me of the wonderful old inn where my wife and I were married in 2000.
The inn dates back to 1797. In the 1990s, they served a variety of local and historical dishes which were delivered to patrons by servers wearing historical garb. The costumes weren’t terribly authentic, but the food was unique and the atmosphere cozy.
The writing was already on the wall when we were married, and when we went back a year later, most of the regional dishes had vanished. Servers, now clad in formal, contemporary clothing now scurried frantically to deliver the same fare you could find in any major city.
After consulting with a reality show business guru, a local Gyro chain with aspirations of going national also stripped all of the regional color out of their stores. We won’t eat there again.
The inn has apparently moved back toward its traditional menu in recent years. It’s too early to tell if the local chain’s newly generic menu and decor will succeed.
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Backing up farmerbob here. Simplicity past a certain point is degradation. WordPress devs are actively degrading the site. WordPress can make noise about fixing what they’ve broken or lost in trying to replace the existing stats page, but it shouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
This isn’t about being resistant to change. Many of us spend long hours using WordPress, and we have high stakes here. What we have works, and rather than refine what we have, we’re seeing things get torn down and started anew with a different design philosophy (ergo, the need to add what’s now missing or broken).
It’s ironic that this whole enterprise runs contrary to the mantra of ‘KiSS: keep it simple, silly’. Forcing people to go by meandering routes (routes that, again, according to other threads and posts, people can’t find in order to get the information they want, it’s complicated, and needlessly so. I’ve yet to see one positive comment about the changes.
And this isn’t just for the stats classic. It goes for the dashboard change (which I still loathe) and the implementation of the new post editor, which WordPress loves to remind me about and which still lacks basic, essential features! And every time I try to go and edit a post and I click the wrong thing or travel the wrong route and end up using the wrong editor, I feel very bad sentiments regarding WordPress.
The entire thing reeks of management issues – it’s like a successful television show getting a new executive producer, who insists on sweeping changes, and things nosedive. Or a successful company gets new leadership who are supposed to take it to the next level, and they sink it instead, or they turn a working formula into a morass of bitterness and resentment, with every member of the team looking into making an exit the first chance they get.
Just like I, and a few others I’ve talked to, are looking into/openly discussing other blogging platforms.
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I had no idea that all of these changes had to do with making it friendlier to mobile devices. I don’t think very many people with very successful sites hosted here are running them primarily from a phone. Most bloggers, blog from a laptop. It seems incredulous to me that we are all unified behind the concept of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Yet for some reason the powers that be are trying to compromise by maybe giving us back some of the usability we have before shutting us out of the functional format. Which will leave our ease of use, compromised.
Again, an update should add new things we need, like the ability to block trolls by email address to name just one. Not make it even harder to blacklist words for moderation.
This makes zero sense to me. I quit teaching over the constantly changing “the standards” and moving on to the next shiny thing when the plan we had was working, among other reasons. This forum reminds me of being in one of those faculty meetings. “I know we have had success with Math Instruction Plan P, and we hope you are going to like Plan Q just as much. Remember Plan F? Plan P is like Plan F but with less room for creativity….” Excuse, I’m having PTSD flashbacks.
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I sense an element of “meanness” in WP response to our complaints about the news stats page. They have now moved the option to choose the old stats page to the very BOTTOM of the new version. FORCING is to SCROLL anyway. With scrolling being our main complaint, this seems to be a deliberate and mean response.
I would think that until such time as this old stats are retired permanently … a threat being routinely dangled over our heads right now … the most respectful and fairest response would be to leave that option on the TOP of the stats page. where it is easily accessible.
This is plain meanness. There is absolutely no other explanation for it.
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I had no idea that all of these changes had to do with making it friendlier to mobile devices.
They’re aiming for a consistent user experience across platforms. The announcements, the Tiger funding deal, and Matt’s comments in the Forbes article all point toward a platform geared as much as possible toward accommodating touch interfaces. This explains the new design language, which fails miserably on laptop and desktop screens.
Simplicity past a certain point is degradation.
Agreed. The point of streamlining would be to remove distractions, but not features. The recent changes are intrusive and call more attention to the new UI, which is contrary to the concept of simplification.
I get the impression that WordPress’s leaders and programmers love the IOS interface, but they don’t seem to grasp the fact that Apple differentiates between iOS and OS X because one size doesn’t fit all.
Even Apple took heat for stripping down its iLife suite; they quietly added back much of the functionality they removed in the latest revision. The difference between that fiasco and WordPress’s latest round of innovations?
We could choose which program we wanted to run.
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I think the most confy way to access the old stats page is at the moment through the wp-admin dashboard main page where a small stats window is in the middle, I click on “view all” there and it opens the good stats page.
However, I support your idea anyway that the button to the old stats page should be on top and not on bottom of the new stats page. As long as this is not the case, wp-admin is a good way. Overall, wp-admin is at the moment my hub lol. Let’s see for how long this is possible. Always if people gave advise here how to access things, it didn’t take a long time until devs removed our options.
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the new people who comment are biased by the previous comments (which causes them to say the exact same feedback worded the exact same way).
I’m addressing this in the primary thread.
First of all @designsimply, I appreciate your candor in this matter. You see things a certain way and call them as such, and I admire that.
Of course, there’s a far more logical explanation that doesn’t patronize newer posters as shills or followers. It’s quite likely that many of us share the same concerns and, rather than jumping on the bandwagon, they’re voicing the same concerns and frustrations as those of us who initially posted in the “Massive Changes” thread.
Many of us have a growing sense of frustration with WP.com’s intransigence, it’s apparent unwillingness to listen to us even as designers make it ever more difficult to avoid that changes to the UI and general usability.
Your response is honest, but it belittles the newer members of this and the other complaint threads and dismisses the legitimate concerns a growing number of us share as the ravings of a minority. One of the most serious of our concerns is that WP isn’t listening to us, and your attitude would seem to reinforce that perception.
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I agree with Fjordaniv. @Designsimply seems to want to discredit honest feedback. We only get one opportunity to voice a complaint., Once stated, then we have to find a new one.
That’s ridiculous. IF you want feedback. When one person complains about scrolling …. you can ignore it. How about fifty. Or a thousand. EVERY single complaint again this feature should get an ear. It’s wrong to demand that no complaint be repeated. Is that feedback?
How many ways can one complain about scrolling? There aren’t too many variations. I can say “Yay cheez bahut bakwas” in Hindi. Or word it in French or Swahili. But the bottom line in plain English is that there’s “too much Scrolling”.
TOO MUCH SCROLLING.
Now I’ve offered this complaint again in caps so it isn’t ” worded in the exact same way”.
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Thanks for dropping by again, designsimply. The last time was on Jan. 9th. https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/stats-classics-how-to-set/page/5?replies=296#post-2205085
Have you even read the comments on this other Stats thread?
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/upgraded-stats-and-changes-to-wp-interface?replies=7#post-2197614I’m still waiting for an answer to whether or not the really, old Stats page through the classic dashboard will be discontinued? (not the one with the map)
When one person takes the time to complain using the Forums it represents a whole lot of people with the same complaint but don’t have the time, or don’t know where the Forums are located, etc.
As many have already stated, they are not using nor wanting to use the “new” Stats page. All the while you are looking for free beta testers to give feedback on how to improve the page that we do not want/use.
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The free beta testers have spoken: at least for the enriched desktop experience, the new page is a horrible devolution and the best thing to do is to bring the old, perfectly functional page back. Seriously I don’t see how they could expect more cogent and detailed analysis of the UX than we’ve provided here.
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