Adiós flash charts
January 18, 2011 by Dave Martin
Since the Akismet stats were first introduced (back in Oct 2008, the hint Joseph mentioned) they have required flash. Nowadays, there are several disadvantages to using flash for charts:
- None of the iOS devices support it
- There’s often a delay before chart data can be displayed
- We are forced to rely on a third-party .swf file which can’t be modified
We’ve redesigned the Akismet stats page to bring it in line visually with the rest of the WordPress admin. There are new view options: the last two months, the last six months, the last year, or all time.
Not only does the page look better, it also loads faster thanks to flot.js. Flot is a great little open source chart library for jQuery. Flot give us complete flexibility over how we display stats, and it allows you to view stats on any device that supports JS.
We hope you enjoy this update!
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Thank you. Looks great!!!
Very nice!
Hopefully you will give the WordPress.com Stats plugin the same treatment so we can enjoy our stats charts on our iOS devices too.
For sites hosted on WordPress.com the stats have already been converted over to not use Flash. At some point the same will happen for users of the stats plugin.
very nice change. thank you
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Akismet is pure awesomeness.
What about moving over to some fancy JavaScript(~jQuery)/HTML(5) animations instead?
Nicely done. Can’t wait to be totally flash free.
I see that akismet_comment_nonce input name is hardcoded. That’s not good, because since it’s always the same on all WP sites, spammers just need to search for that string in the HTML document and get the nonce near it to bypass this security measure.
I suggest passing the string by a filter, so that we can change it to whatever we want, even develop some random string to make it change from time to time. Doing so and trying to obfuscate the nonce input, making it different in each site, spammers will have a hard time finding it.
The nonce is just one data point we use.
Randomizing the nonce name may be something we consider in a future version of the plugin.