Dev Tools · 2h ago
Analytics Pitfall: How Review Deploys Inflated Active Player Counts
A developer building Codenames AI found that his analytics dashboard showed 64 active players, but investigation revealed that review deploys (Vercel preview URLs) were creating separate anonymous identities. The real production traffic was far lower, as search console data showed fewer than 30 clicks in a month. The fix required client-side environment tagging to exclude non-production sessions.
Meridian48 take
The story highlights a common analytics blind spot where development infrastructure can pollute metrics, but the lesson is straightforward: always validate that your instrumentation only captures production traffic.
Read the full reporting
Active players looked real until we asked which sessions counted →
DEV Community
analyticsweb-development