Stats Feedback
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I will simply clarify things here. I am real tired of clicking. I click and then I click and then I click. I am supposed to be blogging, not clicking endlessly. This new setup is just an irritating series of clicks. Here a click, there a click; everywhere a click, click and it is ridiculous. We should not have to explain what the problem is over and over again. You know what the problem is. You broke something that was fixed. You didn’t fix something that was broken and now you want us to thank you for making what we were doing, harder to do. Well, I for one, will not. You obviously have no intentions of bringing back the old stats page ever and we are just wasting our time in continuing to advise you on what it is we dislike about the changes. And with that having been said, I am done, stick a fork in me, I am done!
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@supernovia
Woah, I just realized that summaries for previous 7 days, 30 days, quarter and year are available after all (or have been returned?) to each category!Thank you! – or apologies for my previous ignorance, depending on which it is!
It’s harder to learn where to click for them now–you need to click on the unlabeled
>symbol to the right of each category’s title.In the old stats this link was spelled-out “summaries”.
But I won’t quibble, am happy they are available!
(Wouldn’t the “yesterday” toggle be just as easy to bring back as well?) -
@ingridcc: I think they’ve always been there.
As for the summary tables, I think I’ve found it, but it’s really hard to find. If you click on a post in the “Posts & Pages” module, you’ll be brought to a page that contains the summary tables for that page. If you instead click on “Home page / Archives”, you’ll be taken to a page with the summary tables that you’d see when clicking the “Summaries” link above the graph in the old/classic stats. I’m pretty sure these have been around since the beginning, but they haven’t been obvious.
Perhaps better documentation (including a transition guide from the old stats to the new stats) and better UI hints is the solution we’re looking for.
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@tpenguin: If those last 7 days/ last 30 days etc summaries were always there, supernovia wasn’t aware of it herself… Her earlier answer to me about them (p. 5 of this thread) was to try clicking on a week/ month bar instead.
I think the developers really are working on and adding some things we’ve requested back into the new stats. (if any of you are reading this, Thank you! )
I just ran into this post from one of the designers working on the stats page – it was on a thread a week or so ago about the sparkline, that veered a bit into stats:
The masterbar changes, including the removal of the sparkline, have been a highly debated topic internally as well. I’m one of the developers on the stats system, and based off of feedback we have added the sparkline back to the sidebar menu in the admin area. [my emphasis]
For example, I’ve noticed that the followers tab up at the top right of the main page now has the correct total of followers, whereas email-only followers had been omitted from the total up until we complained here about that.
I checked out the lifetime tables hiding under the “homepage” link, thanks! It’s hard for me to compare them to the old stats because I never used the numerical tables much.
I appreciated having them available, but what I really checked often was just above the tables- that visual bar-graph chart of views for the whole lifetime of any post.
Now the graph only shows the last 10 days of views for a post… <sigh> I like to keep track of views over time of my tutorials, and of a few posts that are the only published sources of particular info about my topic.
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As for the summary tables, I think I’ve found it, but it’s really hard to find. If you click on a post in the “Posts & Pages” module, you’ll be brought to a page that contains the summary tables for that page. If you instead click on “Home page / Archives”, you’ll be taken to a page with the summary tables that you’d see when clicking the “Summaries” link above the graph in the old/classic stats.
That is indeed extremely hidden. Did you find this by chance? :D It’s good that it’s still there, but it really needs a clearly visible summarize link. The fact that even the mods couldn’t tell us that it’s still there, and how to find it, really shows that there is a problem with it.
I think a “Summarize” link beside “Insights, Days, Weeks, Months” would do a better job. Since there is still enough space (at least on desktop), it might not be a problem to put it there. Also it would make sense I think.
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I did find it by chance, actually. I was looking for the thing that @ingridcc had described. Had it not been for that, I probably wouldn’t have thought to look.
Some UI feedback for the tables: make the all-time highest value easier to find and read. The colour #F0B849 (gold) on white offers very poor contrast, and one shouldn’t use colour alone to convey information. In the old/classic stats, the cell with the highest all-time value had a green background (this is not “colour alone” because it also offers contrast against the rest of the cells); this was much easier to spot and much more readable.
An easy way to fix that is to make #F0B849 the background of the cell and keep the text black. The date will have to be something other than #87A6BC (grey-blue), though.
On the topic of contrast, #87A6BC against white also offers poor contrast, as many have said in the past.
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@tpenguinltg, that’s impressive that you found that. What a weird way to get to it!
@supernovia, I’ll ask one more time if there’s some place where this new site is documented.
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To talk about this again…
If you instead click on “Home page / Archives”, you’ll be taken to a page with the summary tables that you’d see when clicking the “Summaries”
I found another issue with it. The “Home page / Archives” entry is not always there. Today for example I can’t find such an entry under “Posts & Pages”.
That means, the only way to get to the overall summary tables, is if our own sites archieve got enough traffic. I assume “Home page / Archives” is tag traffic, while every other entry is of course traffic to individual articles.
Users willl not always be able to visit the summarize table page, that’s problematic.
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I found another issue with it. The “Home page / Archives” entry is not always there. Today for example I can’t find such an entry under “Posts & Pages”.
Indeed. You can get to it by editing the post number in the URL to 0, but the average user isn’t going to do that.
On a somewhat related issue, clicking on “Home page / Archives” results in the error message “We don’t have that post on record yet.” being shown at the top of the page. This is probably a result of using post ID 0, but because the user clicked on an entry in “Posts & Pages”, they should not see that message. As it is right now, having the message there is confusing because I clicked on an entry in that list, then it tells me that it doesn’t exist, but there’s data related to what I clicked below that. The expectation is that the message is replaced with “Home / Archives”, just like the title replaces the message for post stats.
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You can get to it by editing the post number in the URL to 0, but the average user isn’t going to do that.
Yeah, I agree, I would never think of doing that myself!
@diaryofdennis – yup, I remember having that same hitch once in a while if for some reason I wanted to see the lifetime stats graph for a particular post that no one had happened to look at that today. Even in the ‘old stats’ I couldn’t go the lifetime stats for a post (from today’s stats page) if it hadn’t gotten any views today. If I really wanted to see those stats, I would have to click the ‘yesterday’ toggle, or click on a bar in the top graph for some previous day – hunt around for whatever day that post did garner some views.
It turns out that if we go to the classic dashboard’s ‘all posts’ or ‘all pages’ link, we can get to the lifetime stats for any post (or page) there, but it’s a long trip of clicks away from the stats page. (I don’t know if there’s a new Calypso-style format for the “all posts” section and if so, whether it includes a way to access the lifetime bar graph and stats tables of views for each post.)
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Of course, in addition, the old one had colors that were easier on the eye, had numbered axes and lines to easily see the values, and was better formatted too. Please, please bring back the old stats page, it was better in every way.
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You fellows at WordPress do a great job, congrats! Not easy to contact support though, the contact form never loads. Since you seem to read the posts in the forums, here goes: as many users in the threads above, I much preferred the old stats page. Easier to see, it also provided at first glance the total number of views since the beginning, an important piece of information I could not find (not even on the years tab) after several clicks. Would it cost that much to keep the old stats page up for those who prefer it? Thanks!
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Hi folks, sorry I’ve had a busy week or two and have not been able to follow up here. We have been adding new features though.
We aren’t going to be able to reenable the old stats or make the page exactly like the old version, but we have been working hard to find ways to meet your needs. Thanks again for all the feedback here!
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In that case, please refrain from taking down any more old pages (stats, dashboard) when you replace them. Just let people continue to use them.
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Hi @ellenhawley (and everyone else requesting the old code). I’ve mentioned this earlier in the thread, but for those who missed it, the problem is one of maintenance and compatibility with new features. If it were just a matter of not touching the older code, that would be an easy answer and likely one we’d use. But it isn’t; it’s significantly more involved than that.
So we made this thread to gather feedback on what we can do to make the new version better. While I hear you requesting we just turn the old stats back on, I can’t affect much there. I can take feature requests though and notes on what would make the new page better, and we’ve implemented several of those already.
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@nickpmacdonald re: needing to show more than 12 months, thank you, noted and requested.
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