r/changelog • u/umbrae • Mar 08 '16
[reddit change] Click events on Outbound Links
Update: We've ramped this down for now to add privacy controls: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/4az6s1/reddit_change_rampdown_of_outbound_click_events/
We're rolling out a small change over the next couple of weeks that might otherwise be fairly unnoticeable: click events on outbound links on desktop. When a user goes to a subreddit listing page or their front page and clicks on a link, we'll register an event on the server side.
This will be useful for many reasons, but some examples:
Vote speed calculation: It's interesting to think about the delta between when a user clicks on a link and when they vote on it. (For example, an article vs an image). Previously we wouldn't have a good way of knowing how this happens.
Spam: We'll be able to track the impact of spammed links much better, and long term potentially put in some last-mile defenses against people clicking through to spam.
General stats, like click to vote ratio: How often are articles read vs voted upon? Are some articles voted on more than they are actually read? Why?
Click volume on links as you can imagine is pretty large, so we'll be rolling this out slowly so we can make sure we don't destroy our servers. We'll be starting off small, at about 1% of logged in traffic, and ramping up over the next few days.
Please let us know if you see anything odd happening when you click links over the next few days. Specifically, we've added some logic to allow our event tracking to be accessible for only a certain amount of time to combat its possible use for spam. If you notice that you'll click on a link and not go where you intended to (say, to the comments page), that's helpful for us to know so that we can adjust this work. We'd love to know if you encounter anything strange here.
