Silent JS Bugs Skewed Months of Analytics on a Live Product Search Site
A developer running OneFindMe, a multilingual AliExpress product search engine, discovered a cluster of long-standing JavaScript bugs only after installing a session-recording tool — despite all automated checks showing green. A flawed HTML-entity escaping method in inline click handlers caused syntax errors for product titles containing apostrophes, silently breaking favourite, share, and analytics tracking on roughly a third of every results page. Because the underlying product links remained intact, no sales were directly lost, but click-through rate data collected over months was systematically undercounted, corrupting product decisions made on that data. A second bug referenced a renamed CSS class that no longer existed, rendering two buttons completely inert, a fact only made visible when session recordings showed a user clicking the same dead button five times in 26 seconds before abandoning the session. The incident highlights that passing automated checks does not confirm a working user experience, and that client-side errors which leave no server-side trace can only be reliably caught through direct page observation.
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