The basic problem is, as I have understood, that your new upgrade to the Top Post widget causes it to malfunction when the blog gets large number of traffic. Your response at the news article suggested that "it looks at posts with a certain number of views"

So what are those certain number of views?

My blog averages 3000 page views per day and the widget before and after the upgrade, has been working fine during the normal average traffic. But recently my blog averaged 5000 page views ... and the updated Top Post widget was broken exactly during those specific days of high traffic.

There has to be a technical explanation to this if my hypothesis is correct. I would expect that the Top Post widget show exactly the number of items I select in the setting, and it shouldn't malfunction just because the blog is generating traffic above "certain number of views".

I would appreciate a clarification and explanation of what happened and how you can guarantee that it won't happen again during the next rush hour.

Thanks and I appreciate the time you spend in taking care of the bloggers.

I wonder what's been happening with the degraded support strategy at WordPress.com? It used to be the single most effective feature of this blog platform!

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.

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

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.

...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.

@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.