Why were titles in "Top Posts and Pages" suddenly abbreviated today?
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@feartheseeds, I hadn’t thought of that. That would at least serve for Recent Posts. But it won’t do anything for Top Post & Pages, which I think is more important. After all, Recent Posts are likely displayed on the home page anyway.
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Another fine “improvement” dropped in on the weekend with no warning and a half baked implementation – I wonder whose “great idea” this was?
Sure screws some things up and makes it hard to understand what some of the Posts are about – another fine job folks
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Sorry, staff-blorbo, no matter how I resize my browser window, it still looks fubar. Titles which were already wrapped in the widget are still wrapped in the widget but now end in meaningless dots.
Not a lot of happiness engineering here…
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Good job justpi on the before and after images side by side.
windwhistle. You’re not alone in that fear. Certainly, other widgets may soon suffer the same fate.
What WordPress will probably do is allow us to regain the right to have full titles displayed in the sidebar widgets by purchasing the Custom Design upgrade, just as they have done with regard to “Infinite Scroll.”
See my post, Defeating WordPress.com’s new “Infinite Scroll” scam.
They’re trying to force us to purchase the upgrade in order to get rid of that nasty new “Load More Posts” link at the bottom of page one, and replace it with the perfectly fine “previous posts” or “earlier posts” links we’ve had for years.
I’ve created a way to neutralize and elude “infinite scroll.” Very simple. Just use the menu widget to make a list of links to your archived pages, i.e. all pages earlier than the front page. Alternatively, you could place these links in a post or page. I’ve got the list in both the post given above and in a menu at the top of the sidebar.
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Thanks, sorry that I was wrong. I figured you were referring to the stats interface.
A lot of interesting replies here, so just to clear up a few of them:
1. This is not a marketing scheme. That just makes no sense as a marketing element. It appears to be nothing more than a simple design change.
2. We do not announce minor changes, otherwise there would be about 5 or so announcements every day.
We strive very hard to provide an outstanding free service that appeals to all of our 37+ million users and their 31+ million blogs. As you can imagine, it’s often incredibly difficult to make everyone happy, but we really do try.
In this case, I see that a few of you are unhappy, and I’ll see what we can do about that.
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staff-blorbo — Obviously the widget can’t be infinitely wide but it can be infinitely deep, as it was before (and still is in the Recent Posts widget). Titles should continue to wrap for as many lines as necessary until they are complete. The addition of static-width images shouldn’t change that.
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@musicdoc1-Thank you! I’d been wracking my brain all morning trying to remember the name for that (ellipsization).
@macmanx- As a design change, it makes no sense. The titles were already wrapped. Truncating them adds nothing but lack of clarity for the site visitor.
I smell responsive design and, in some cases, rolling it out to existing themes is not always a good idea.
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…an outstanding free service that appeals to all of our 37+ million users and their 31+ million blogs… I see that a few of you are unhappy,
Please don’t do that. The new service doesn’t work properly, it shouldn’t take a 50+1 vote to determine that.
2. We do not announce minor changes, otherwise there would be about 5 or so announcements every day.
Two brand new widgets, plus a major reconfiguration of another, seems like kind of a big deal…
Me: Personally I don’t see this as an ‘urgent’ threat to my blog, it kind of sits in the ‘annoyance / oh man, not another unannounced change to my blog / exasperated’ range.
This is just a new thing that needs a tweak, that’s all. Thank you, macmanx, for taking our concerns to the appropriate people.
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I really feel so frustrated with this, because my readers used to click on those Top Posts and Pages a lot, and now the traffic has decreased almost to zero on that widget. That’s why I preferred to hide it rather than displaying such a flawed and useless design.
Rather than losing traffic while Staff cogitate over the responses to this unwelcome change one could temporarily use a text widget to create their own Top Posts and Pages widget.
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@timethief Thanks, that’s a great idea. I’ll do that until this this is solved. I’m crossing my fingers so that WordPress realizes they need to go back to the multiple-line version of the Top Posts and Pages widget
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Sorry folks, no conspiracy going on here, we just got a little overzealous with the inclusion of some sanitization code in this widget that also truncated titles.
I’ve changed that now so you should have your full-length titles back again.
For what it’s worth, this change accidentally made it in while we were completely rewriting the backend of this widget. It’s surprisingly difficult to try to maintain “backwards compatibility” (keep all output identical) while completely reworking the code behind these things. Our intent is to provide both a better experience for you (in this case, faster queries == faster page loads) and also write code for us which is more maintainable and more flexible for the addition of future features. It doesn’t always work out exactly like that. We’re all human.
Beau
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For what it’s worth, this change accidentally made it in while we were completely rewriting the backend of this widget. … We’re all human.
Thank you so much for addressing this. It’s appreciated.
Without doubt we sound btichy and annoyed because we are bitchy and annoyed. From our end of things there have been many unwelcomed changes that were not announced. Throughout 2011 and 2012 we awake again and again to find what feels somewhat like a home invasion has occured. We work hard on our blogs and by analogy we wake up to find our blog closets and cupboards have been tossed and underwear drawers have been pawed through, that’s not to dwell on all of our stuff that is now on wordpress.com’s home page and th fact that we have yet to hear why that move was made.
We are also only human Beau and those of us who did not flee to self hosting in the last exodus are virtually praying every night when we put our blogs to bed that they will not be invaded while we sleep.
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