1182210 - Store one short URL from Bitly for every document in database

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Performance, defect)

Description

[Jannis Leidel [:jezdez]]

What feature should be changed? Please provide the URL of the feature if possible.
==================================================================================
We currently use a bitly URL for every document for the share links feature but request that URL on demand as well as three times with different GET parameters. This should instead be stored during render time, possibly as a celery task so this is unblocked from Bitly's API time.

What problems would this solve?
===============================
This would reduce the interaction with a 3rd party API to a minimum.

Who would use this?
===================
n/a

What would users see?
=====================
n/a

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
n/a

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================

Comment 1

[Jannis Leidel [:jezdez]]

:hoosteeno :groovecoder To make sure I'm on the right track, it's okay for us from the GA perspective to drop the utm_source parameters that are different in the three uses of the bitly in the shared links rendering? Instead I'd like to just use one source for each document's short URL, in a db table field.

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/blob/0a3f1f984f6872669039ae5239180cedbf3dfd6b/kuma/wiki/templates/wiki/includes/document_macros.html#L210-L212

Comment 2

[Stephanie Hobson [:shobson]]

We will lose the ability to back-track which services' shares are providing us the most benefit but since that's not in the requirements on bug 875062 I think that's okay.

Sounds like you were also discussing this with :hoosteeno :groovecoder so I will leave the needs info for them to chime in.

Comment 3

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

302 :garethc ...

Gareth - I couldn't find a quick answer to this. If we create tracking urls with utm_campaign and utm_medium, but **without** a utm_source parameter, will GA fill in the source based on the referring domain as it does for non-campaign traffic?

Comment 4

[Gareth Cull [:garethc]]

Hey Luke,

utm_medium and utm_source need to be set together, else the traffic will look like direct and not set. 

See this example url:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/?utm_source=test&utm_campaign=test-campaign&luke=cool

Going into real-time and Filtering on luke=cool...you'll notice that utm_source and medium do not get set properly:
http://cl.ly/image/0k162g3v3l3J

Unfortunately, source and medium need to be set together. Hope this helps!

Gareth

Comment 5

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Thanks :garethc. needinfo? myself to check with bitly if they will preserve a utm_source parameter if we append it to the short url in the jinja template.

Comment 6

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

UPDATE: bitly is going to charge us (again) for an additional premium feature to preserve utm parameters thru short-links. :hoosteeno can confirm - we're going to skip the short-links and use long links at first.

Comment 7

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

Here's what short links get us:

1) A nice short link at http://mzl.la...
2) Another analytics dashboard about link activity

We only care about #1, and as near as I can tell it's really just a vanity feature without much functional impact. We don't care about it enough to pay the ongoing rate that bit.ly proposes. So let's use long links and launch the feature.

Comment 8

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

In that case, I'm removing this from the bug tree of both the feature and the performance sprint. I'll add a new bug to remove the short links to block the feature.

Comment 9

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

Bitly has turned on a flag that will allow parameters on a shortlink to pass directly through to MDN. That means we can store one short link for every article, and then at page render time we can add utm parameters to the link. 

Example:

* if mzl.la/lorem_ipsum is a shortlink to developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array

* then mzl.la/lorem_ipsum?utm_source=hoosteeno.com is a shortlink to developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array?utm_source=hoosteeno.com

So this bug is now about storing one shortlink in the database per article.

Comment 10

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

:jezdez - did you have a branch around somewhere that moves this logic into a celery task? I might try to pick it back up now that we have the right bitly feature.

Comment 11

[Jannis Leidel [:jezdez]]

Ah, I didn't have a branch, this was one of the tickets I filed while I was in the area of the code but didn't have time to do right away. Pick up as you like, :robhudson also just asked.

Comment 12

[MDN Team (:mdn-dev)]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/12fec494d546429df7c053cef3eb6ff58d9e9482
fix bug 1182210 - Store bitly URLs on model

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/4a74dafd007531b1a10b5bb0741cacfedb7327c2
Merge pull request #3505 from robhudson/1182210-bitly

fix bug 1182210 - Store bitly URLs on model

Comment 13

[MDN Team (:mdn-dev)]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/737a868d090fc43082d75335b3d73ef92a21561f
Bug 1182210 - Update share links to only trigger tasks once per page

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/f2987375afe08a677dc3afd8f2b9de68991f5e95
Merge pull request #3524 from mozilla/share-links

Bug 1182210 - Update share links to only trigger tasks once per page

Comment 14

[MDN Team (:mdn-dev)]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/829cf86128b29b7897ec83587ad286313e95bd8c
Bug 1182210 - Waffle share_links

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/e0f9d89a2d65abbf093e7f9f824f2de7c1b7f8fa
Merge pull request #3526 from robhudson/waffle-share-links

Bug 1182210 - Waffle share_links

Comment 15

[MDN Team (:mdn-dev)]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/45bd43e0808f32286220631d8e11c5d0789a84e3
Bug 1182210 - Use full URLs for sharing

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/ec53e4b7848c59b7edeb11fbf783205c8177af5a
Merge pull request #3560 from mozilla/full-url-sharing

Bug 1182210 - Use full URLs for sharing