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feat(ads): rotate the house ad so unsold slots stop looking frozen - #174
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Until a slot has paid inventory every fill on it is a house ad, and the house ad was a single hard-coded creative. That made the unit byte-identical on every request: profullstack.com/motd printed the same "Your ad here" block on every login, which reads as a cached or broken endpoint rather than a live one. Nothing was actually cached -- both /api/ads/motd and the /motd consumer are already no-store -- there was simply only ever one thing to serve. Make the house ad a pool of six variants and draw one per fill, pitched at both sides of the network (publishers with a surface to monetize, advertisers with a product to sell). An unsold slot now rotates on every request, and the 10% house rotation on sold slots stops repeating itself too. The draw happens once in houseFill and is threaded through both houseCreative and renderHouseAdHtml; drawing independently in each would let a single impression show one pitch in its HTML and another in its text. Variants carry a slug that rides the click URL as utm_content so we can tell which pitch converts -- left off the terminal URL, which is printed as literal text inside the ASCII box and has no width to spare. Verified all six variants render ASCII-clean with aligned boxes at cols=44/72/120. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
vu1nz Security Review0 finding(s) in PR #? No security issues found. |
ralyodio
marked this pull request as ready for review
July 31, 2026 11:32
This was referenced Jul 31, 2026
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Why
profullstack.com/motdprints the same CrawlProof ad block on every request, which reads as a stale or cached endpoint.It isn't caching. Both ends are already correct:
/api/ads/motdisforce-dynamic+cache-control: no-store, and picks a bid-weighted random winner per request./motdconsumer inprofullstack-webfetches per request withcache: 'no-store'and servesCache-Control: no-store(verified against live headers).The block never changes because the network has no paid terminal inventory yet, so every fill is the house ad — and the house ad was one hard-coded creative. One thing to serve, served identically, forever.
What
HOUSEbecomesHOUSE_VARIANTS, a pool of six, drawn per fill. Copy is pitched at both sides of the network: publishers with a surface to monetize, advertisers with a product to sell.Effects:
HOUSE_AD_ROTATION_RATEon sold slots stops repeating itself.Two details worth review:
houseFill, and is threaded through bothhouseCreativeandrenderHouseAdHtml. Drawing independently in each would let a single impression pitch one thing in its HTML and another in its text — covered by a test.utm_contentis added to non-terminal click URLs only. The terminal URL is printed as literal text inside the ASCII box and has no width to spare.House fills stay unmetered and unbilled;
campaignId/creativeIdremain"house".Verification
npm run typecheckclean.renderCreativeTextatcols=44/72/120: ASCII-clean, boxes stay rectangular.tests/contract/ads-house-rotation.test.tsconfirmed to fail onmaster(2 of 4) and pass on this branch.One pre-existing issue this surfaced but does not change: at
cols=44the click-URL line overflows the box (58 chars vs 44). It is URL-length driven and identical onmasteracross all variants. Flagging it rather than fixing it here.🤖 Generated with Claude Code