Clicked recommendations are hidden

When a user clicks a recommendation (ad, internal article, Visitor Accelerator article, etc) that recommendation will not be displayed to the user again.

This filtering is done on the client side. What that means is that we send out e.g. 8 recommendations from the server side to the client (the browser of the user). Recommendations that the user has already clicked is then filtered out.

This can cause some issues in debugging why some content is not displayed. Say for instance that you have a widget with 4 slots that should contain 50% internal recommendations and 50% ads:

Internal article
Internal article
Ad
Ad

Let's now assume the user has already clicked our top two ad recommendations, what would happen then?

Since the filtering is done client side, the server do not know that two of the ads it's serving will actually be hidden. We always server twice the number of recommendations needed to fill a widget page, hence the widget would now look like this:

Page 1: Internal article
Page 1: Internal article
Hidden: Ad
Hidden: Ad
Page 1: Internal article
Page 1: Internal article
Page 2: Ad
Page 2: Ad

My widget does not show correct numer of ads
First off we should try to debug if this is due to the fact that ads has already been clicked and hidden client side. Do the following:

1. Open your browser in Private Mode (if you have multiple browsers installed, use one that you are normally not using)
2. Go to the URL where widget showed incorrect number of ads and locate the widget
3. Open the browser Web Inspector
4. In the Web Inspector go to the tab called Storage
5. Locate a Key named sprinkle_clicked and delete it, here is an example from news55.se in Safari:
   
   
   
   
6. Reload the page, locate the widget and see if correct number of ads are now showing up