fix(ads): demote self-owned campaigns instead of dropping them (serving outage)

[ralyodio]

Production: paid serving has been dark since ~06:04 UTC today. Every request, on every format, falls through to the house ad. Because house fills are unmetered, nothing records an impression — so /ads reads as zero delivery rather than as an outage.

Cause

The self-deal guard filters any campaign whose owner matches the slot owner out of the candidate list, then bails to the house ad when the list is empty:

const candidates = creatives.filter((row) => {
  const c = oneCampaign(row.ad_campaigns);
  if (!c) return false;
  return !(slot.owner_id && c.owner_id === slot.owner_id);   // <-- drops it
});
if (candidates.length === 0) return houseFill(format);

Correct on a network with other advertisers. Fatal on one without. Confirmed in production:

• Every active slot is owned by 47ba37b2…
• All 34 active terminal_ascii campaigns are owned by 47ba37b2…
• other_campaigns = 0 for every slot

So the filter removes 100% of inventory on every request. Raw SQL shows 34 eligible creatives; the serving path sees none.

Fix

The intent is sound — ad_charge_click refuses to bill or accrue on a self-click, so a self-owned campaign must never win paid inventory ahead of an advertiser who would actually pay. Dropping it outright was the wrong lever.

It's now demoted to the free tier, the same place a campaign that has run out of funds goes. Between a real advertiser's creative and the house ad — neither of which can earn on this request — the real creative is strictly the better fill, and it records an impression, so delivery is visible again.

Verification

• Full suite 1257 passed, 7 skipped (1251 + 6 new). npm run typecheck clean.
• The three blackout tests fail on master, reproducing the outage exactly.
• The three guard tests pass both before and after, confirming the self-deal protection is not weakened: a self-owned campaign still never takes paid inventory from a third-party advertiser.

Notes

Not caused by #174/#175/#176 — those deployed at 11:37 and later, hours after serving stopped. The regression is in the #171/#172 window, which matches the last recorded impression at 06:04:17.

Separately and still outstanding: 20260731130000_ad_impression_short_codes.sql from #176 has not been applied, so short codes remain inert (running their intended fallback).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[github-actions]

vu1nz Security Review

0 finding(s) in PR #?

No security issues found.