Remove update stats

Rebase of #1416
Fixes #1416

A note to @joshuaadickerson not to break compatibility for the 1.x line, instead of removing the function I simply marked it as deprecated.
I tend to prefer to provide a wrapper function to maintain the backward compat. The day we decide we don't want to maintain this compatibility any more, 2.0 will born. :angel: 

ETA wrong Joshua... sorry!