Broken WP dashboard and stats panel

Another week has gone by and another post needs to be written to explain why some people are probably seeing errors on their WordPress dashboard. Having trouble seeing your site stats from Jetpack, or being asked “Are you human?” … likelihood is your suffering the same Heart Internet ‘problems’ I am.

Have you recently started seeing this appearing on your dashboard:

We were unable to get your stats just now. Please reload this page to try again. If this error persists, please contact support. In your report please include the information below.

User Agent: “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31”
Page URL: “http://www.pauljoyce.co.uk/wp-admin/admin.php?page=stats&noheader”
API URL: “http://dashboard.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?noheader=true&proxy&page=stats&blog=xxx&charset=UTF-8&color=classic&j=1:2.0”
http_request_failed: “Couldn’t resolve host ‘dashboard.wordpress.com'”

You may also have bumped into this screen when signing in or out of your WordPress install:

These two issues are actually different sides of the same coin, I believe.

As regular readers, or regular WordPress owners, you’ll probably be aware that many bot-nets and hackers are hitting the WP network quite hard at the moment. Due to this, Heart Internet (and many others) implemented an additional security layer to add some protection to their customers. I wrote about the suspicious popup here.

In fact Heart Internet have posted this article about the captcha they’ve implemented.

So while it looks like it breaks a few components on the WP dashboard, unfortunately it doesn’t look like something you can opt out of, not that I’d recommend that anyway.

Hopefully a more permanent solution is on the horizon. In the mean while though I’d recommend reading these 4 simple tips to hardening your WordPress installs.

I know it knocks out the Jetpack Site sites component as well as the ‘Top Posts’ block, but please drop a message below if its blocking any other features.