Top Posts & Pages Block: Remove Deleted Content

[Aurorum]

Fixes Automattic/wp-calypso#90308

Proposed changes:

• Filters out deleted content from the Top Posts and Pages block.

Jetpack product discussion

N/A.

Does this pull request change what data or activity we track or use?

No.

Testing instructions:

• Create a post and view it several times from an incognito browser (note: stats are cached for five minutes)
• Add a Top Posts and Pages block
• Delete the post, and confirm that the post currently still appears in the block
• Confirm that this change ensures the post no longer appears

For context, this issue only applies to posts which are published and viewed several times, then subsequently deleted; the API endpoint still considers them a 'most viewed post', even though it has been deleted. It doesn't apply to the randomly generated posts whenever there aren't enough posts provided by the endpoint.

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[jeherve]

This feels like something that may be best addressed higher up, at least in the get_top_posts method of WPCOM_Stats.

@Automattic/red What's your take on this?

[Aurorum]

I originally thought so too, but I concluded that there might be cases where it’s beneficial to display all the top posts irrespective of whether they’ve been deleted - for example, in the Stats dashboard on the backend, where users might want to compare all posts regardless of whether they’ve now been deleted.

I think this is the only case where the top posts list is actually shown to site readers, which is where I felt deleted posts ought to be removed.

Happy to change it if you reckon that’d be more fitting though!