Activity wasn't showing until browser cookies were deleted

[Michael_Wills]

We have an XT activity live on websiteabc - which is appearing for a specific visitor in incognito, but not in their regular (non-incognito) browsing state.

On a hunch, I suspected that It wasn't showing it because it was affected by something that had been stored/cached... and so I did two things to try and resolve it:

1. Delete all cookie data for the websiteabc domain
2. Delete all cookie data on websiteabc.demdex.net

After I had done this and refreshed the page in question, the activity appeared. 

This leads me to think that this is something that might affect a much larger cohort of all website visitors - which is not ideal. I don't believe that our caching system (cloudflare) would affect this. 

Has anyone experienced this before and do you have any suggestions for mitigating it?

[alexbishop · Accepted solution]

Did you see anything in the console and/or see the network request being sent to Target? It depends a bit on what the problem is but there will usually be some console logs explaining why the request to Target couldn't be made or why the activity content couldn't be rendered correctly. 

I have seen occasionally that 2 mbox cookies have been set, which can happen in two scenarios:
i) when migrating from mbox.js to at.js
ii) when using the Chrome VEC helper extension
In both of these examples, it will prevent the request being sent to Target successfully

So if you do experience this again, and you do use the Chrome VEC helper extension, I'd suggest double checking whether two mbox cookies have been set 

[Michael_Wills]

Interesting - where would the mbox cookies normally be set (which domain)?

@alexbishop So I was actually able to observe what you described in ii). 

It's a first party cookie on the domain where the target activity is deployed, called 'mbox'.

Non-incognito: 

'.domain-name.com'

'www.domain-name.com'

Incognito:

'.domain-name.com'

Leads me to believe that the www version is placed by the VEC extension. Deleting it and refreshing the page allows the activity to appear. 

Thanks again 🙂