Do not remove code when changing activation targets.
Frequently I need to switch my coding / set up from a staging to a production environment. Optimizely warns me and then REMOVES all my code.
This is fine if you are a basic non-technical user.
It would be better if this was an optional change.
Possibly provide a check box and a message in the button (see screenshot) - which would allow me to change the targeting.
Joel Polsky
shared this idea
Will be taken into account when reworking pages and how they operate.
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David Shinn
commented
In order to support testing of more complicated experiments that require server side code changes, in tandem with experiment JS/CSS changes, please allow the changing of a project target URL without deleting all the experiment changes.
RapidX already has the ability to do this (they have a button that can bypass the change deletion behavior), meaning the use case is valid and the code has already been written. I'm not sure if it's an oversight or if there is a justifiable design reason why customers cannot do the same.
Since we control both the experiment change selectors and the server side code, we can guarantee our server side changes are deployed before moving the experiment target to production.
This will allow us to test that the server side code changes and the selectors for the experiment are working together correctly, without needing to deploy our server side code changes all the way up to production.
Having to deploy server side code changes all the way up to production just to QA the experiment creates unnecessary risk, extra branch management complexity, extra deployment time, and more overall deployments.
On the experimentation side, having the selectors be deleted when moving project target URLs creates extra work and risk of losing changes .
An alternative suggested to us by support was to run the experiment with both test and production targets from the beginning, but this creates muddy statistics because test and prod traffic will be feeding in to the same metrics.