Last modified: 2013-02-11 18:19:08 UTC
I was browsing this page (logged-in): https://ba.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropoda And noticed the following request is made on every single page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:RecordImpression?result=hide&reason=empty&country=NL&userlang=en&project=wikipedia&db=bawiki&sitename=%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F&bucket=1 What's up with that?
When we do show a banner it's important that we record that fact -- it allows us to determine the effectiveness of fundraising banners. We also record the non showing of a banner as a sort of debug mechanism. We've been attempting to use the data to determine why there is such a large descrepency between requests for banners and impressions. It also allowed us to model the falloff rate of impressions when we made the change to only show banners to new users -- those that had only seen less than n banners. Not a defense, just background -- this is exactly what we'd been doing before, just more obvious now due to the requirement of the record impression call (It's difficult to determine after the event what banner was served from BannerRandom as that only provides us the slot number).
I'm now thinking that CentralNotice will track categories of banners. And then set properties specific to them -- IE: hide cookie name/duration and if it's a reporting banner.
