Page Delivery Configuration Anomaly

[bkmills]

Hello community!

I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on page delivery rules.

Today I had an experience where an XT activity pointing to a lower environment was exposed to our production environment. This was totally unexpected because the delivery rules explicitly set the domain to something like foostg.com, for example. However, the experience was exposed to foo.com (again an example for added context).

After identifying the issue I ended up having to add a Domain does not contain template rule for foo.com.

The thing that scares me is this could happen with any activity in development, inadvertently exposing it to a live audience.

I experienced this once before years ago, where a manager asked why an A/B test that was in development, was visible in production? I disputed the claim but could never figure out how this was possible. Now I think I know how. But why would an activity be delivered to two different domains when only one was specified?

Given the above explanation, is this behavior expected? I can't imagine the answer being yes, but curious what others have experienced. I wanted to get some insight before opening a customer service ticket to see if there's a bigger issue going on here.

Thanks,

Brion

Cc: @Amelia_Waliany 

[alexbishop · Accepted solution]

At a high-level, if your activity URL is www.foostg.com then it of course should not qualify a visitor on www.foo.com. However, the devil is in the detail with these scenarios i.e., you will need to provide the full configuration with actual URLs etc, so I would recommend creating a ticket with Customer Care so that an explanation can be given on exactly why this is happening

[bkmills]

Thank you @alexbishop! I usually get quicker responses here, but that's the next step.

[maccg12]

Would you mind sharing what the root cause and resolution was for you in this scenario?

[bkmills]

@maccg12 - We were never able to reproduce the issue. As a fail-safe, I now include a configuration rule to exclude production URLs/Domains, while activities are still in development.