Classic Stats Redirect script v2 released!

Version 2.0.0 of my classic stats redirect script is out! I had actually released it on Thursday, but I didn’t get a chance to write this post until now. If you have auto-updating enabled for the script, which is the default, you should have already received the update. Otherwise, you can head over to Greasy Fork to install it manually. This new version redirects instead to the classic dashboard stats page. Thanks goes to PiedType for alerting me of the problem and to Dennis for the idea for the solution.

If you would prefer to use the new stats page and would like to use your screen space a little more, you can install my stylesheet that does that.

If you’d like to learn more about how the script works, keep reading. Otherwise, you can stop here and enjoy your classic stats! Leave a comment if you have any trouble setting it up or if you have any questions.

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WordPress.com staff warned us about the deprecation of the old stats page last year, and as of yesterday, it’s now gone. My stats redirect script broke as a result, causing a redirect loop. I would have liked at least a notice the day before they were going to take it down, but I didn’t expect anything given their record of not informing us of things beforehand.

To solve this, I had to first check to see what kind of redirect was happening. If it was a JavaScript redirect, there might have been a way around it. If it was a server-side redirect, the page was probably gone for good. To check, I exported my cookies and did a HEAD request. This was the output:

$ curl -b cookies.txt -I https://wordpress.com/my-stats      
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2016 00:59:39 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Location: https://wordpress.com/stats
X-ac: 2.ewr _dca
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15552000; preload

The important part is the first line of the output: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently. As the description suggests, this means that the page at the URL is a permanent redirect to the URL given by the Location header which in this case is https://wordpress.com/stats.

As I feared, it was a server-side redirect. There is a very slim chance in which appending a certain query variable to the URL would prevent a redirect, but I was not optimistic and I would have no effective way of guessing what that would be. In any case, a hotfix needed to be pushed out as quickly as possible to prevent the infinite redirect from happening. I decided the best hotfix would be to disable the functionality altogether, because no redirect is better than a redirect loop.

Commit 0399840 implemented the hotfix, which was to return control before any of the redirect code ran.

// @run-at document-start
// ==/UserScript==

// The old stats page has been taken offline.
// Until a fix can be made (if that's even possible),
// return early to prevent an infinite redirect
return;

var parsedUrl=window.location.pathname.match(/stats(\/([^\/]*))?/);
var blogDomain=parsedUrl[2];

I was ready to make my script obsolete when Dennis suggested that I make it redirect to the classic dashboard stats page instead.

The approach I settled on was similar to the approach that the editor redirect script takes: attempt to get the blog URL from the API and fall back to the blog domain in the URL if the API returned an error (e.g. for private blogs), then use that to build . Using the domain would work for WordPress.com sites, but it isn’t guaranteed to work with Jetpack-enabled sites, so the API is called first to get a more precise URL. Ideally, I’d have the API call be authenticated so that I would be able to get the wp-admin URL directly, but I still haven’t figured out authentication yet. If a blog domain isn’t found in the URL, then the redirect is aborted.

if (blogDomain) {
  // Redirect to post URL based on API results
  // API docs: https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/api/
  fetchJSONFile("https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1.1/sites/" + blogDomain,
    // attempt to redirect using API
    function(data) {
      redirectToClassicStats(data.URL);
    },

    // fallback: attempt to use the blog domain
    function() {
      // use http instead of https in case the server doesn't support https
      // (e.g. for Jetpack sites)
      redirectToClassicStats('http://' + blogDomain);
    }
  );
}

The regular expression I use to parse the initial URL breaks it up into two parts: the stats type, and the blog domain.

var parsedUrl = window.location.pathname.match(/stats\/(insights|day|week|month|year)(?:\/([^\/]*))?/);
var statsType = parsedUrl[1];
var blogDomain = parsedUrl[2];

EDIT 2016-12-25: This regex is incomplete. v2.0.1 makes the stats type optional.

The stats type can be one of “insights”, “day”, “week”, “month”, or “year”, and of those, “day”, “week” and “year” map directly to tabs in the classic stats page. Here’s the redirect code:

function redirectToClassicStats(baseUrl) {
  var query = ["page=stats"];

  switch (statsType) {
    case "day":
      query.push("unit=1");
      break;
    case "week":
      query.push("unit=7");
      break;
    case "month":
      query.push("unit=31");
      break;
  }

  window.location.replace(baseUrl + '/wp-admin/index.php?' + query.join("&"));
}

This function takes in the base URL, which is either from the API or constructed using the domain as appropriate. It adds the stats type to the query part of the URL (the part that goes after the ?) if it can, then builds the URL based on the base URL and the query part.

Taking this site as an example, if I went to go check my weekly stats at https://wordpress.com/stats/week/tpenguinltg.wordpress.com, the parser would recognize that the stats type is week and the blog domain is tpenguinltg.wordpress.com. The script will then call the API and the API will return with https://tpenguinltg.wordpress.com. The code then builds the redirect URL based on the URL returned by the API and the stats type, giving https://tpenguinltg.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=stats&unit=7. The script then redirects to that constructed URL, giving me the classic dashboard stats.

Up next is version 2.1.0. In that version, I plan to support redirecting when there is no blog domain (e.g. for /stats, /stats/insights, /stats/day, etc.). This will probably be done by scraping the page for the first blog, which is always your main blog. This will also get around the bug caused by the JavaScript navigation that the new stats uses in which navigating to another stats page using links in the new stats page does not redirect, even if the URL would normally be matched.

• classic stats redirect script
• hack
• redirect script
• user script
• WordPress.com