The Shining New Feature in Vanity 1.6.0 is bot/crawler shushing.
If you’re A/B testing a public page, sooner or later it will get hit by bots, crawlers and other non-human user agents. You may not care to include them in your experiment, but they’ll still be counted as participants.
Filtering the Machines by headers didn’t work out as well, so instead we introduced the option to use JavaScript callbacks to count participants.
It’s as simple as:
- Turn it on: Vanity.playground.use_js!
- Set Vanity.playground.add_participant_path = ‘/path/to/vanity/action’
- Add <%= Vanity.vanity_js %> to the bottom of any view that needs to set up an ab_test
Credit goes to Doug Cole.
The new release also packs 14 tweaks and bug fixes. Quoting the changelog:
- Fix for metrics on rails 3 models (Esteban Pastorino)
- Use JavaScript to report participants, useful for ignoring bots on publicly accessible pages (Doug Cole)
- AbTest#choose returns an Alternative rather than just the value (Doug Cole)
- Add warnings instead of swallowing errors (Anthony Eden)
- Fixing broken test for mongodb adapter (Joshua Krall)
- Fix returning correct experiment when in test mode and manually set via #chooses (Ryan Sonne)
- Don’t round the conversion rate before using it, it affects the test results, making them less accurate (Doug Cole)
- Fixed loading config from yml when using other than redis adapter (Arttu Tervo)
- Default to localhost unless host in config file (Arttu Tervo)
- Fixed mongo connection adapter connect! when called after disconnect! (Arttu Tervo)
- Use mongo replica set connection if multiple hosts were given in YAML configuration file (Arttu Tervo)
- Cookie domain from rails configuration (Arttu Tervo)
- Add bson_ext to Gemfile to load C extension for mongodb ruby driver, and prevent Notice messages as the tests run (tenaciousflea)
- Update redis-namespace dependency to 1.0 (Ville Lautanala)
Thanks to all of you listed above for making this release possible.