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"we have detected that you are using the IP and/or UA rules" (7)

06-12-2017 07:58 AM #1 osmiumman (Member)
"we have detected that you are using the IP and/or UA rules"

Did any of you also get this email from Voluum last Friday?

***
Facebook has placed a hard stance on IP and UA rules. If we do not comply all of our users will lose the ability to run Facebook traffic through Voluum. 2% of our users use these rules and as we do not want to jeopardize the ability to track Facebook for the other 98% of our users we have made the decision to remove and disable UA and IP rules this Monday at 3PM GMT.
Please make appropriate changes on your account prior to this time. Thank you for your understanding.
Kind regards,
The Voluum Team
***

I'm confused because I'm not sure what it means. In Voluum settings, there's a tab with "IP/UA filtering". But I don't have any rules there, so I'm not sure why I got that email?
Didn't get a reply from Voluum support since my request on Friday, that's why I wanted to check if anyone of you knows more about this.

06-12-2017 10:07 AM #2 Mobidea (Veteran Member)

Hi!

From what we understood from the email, they can be speaking of 2 different options. First is IP/UA filtering rules, which allow filtering results coming from IPs that you don't want to show up in your reports, mainly because they come from bot traffic; and the other thing is really creating rules on your flow based on IP.

If we got it right, seems like it won't be possible to filter by IP ranges anymore, although this feature has been added quite recently. Now it's good for you to be aware of it, as it can mess up the statistics. And if you were not using it anyway, you can ignore the message.

I believe @Voluum here can also give some insights, and see if I understood the message correct

06-12-2017 12:48 PM #3 voluum (Veteran Member)

Hi Guys,

The change affects only the in-campaign rules used by some users to redirect traffic by particular parameters e.g. IP/UA. Facebook is trying to reduce fraud in the advertising run on their platform and they reach out to some companies like ours and ask to help them with that. They've indicated that the particular rule is/can be used by advertisers to run fraud ads and asked us to remove this option from Voluum. Having to decide between losing Facebook as a traffic source available for our customers and removing one potentially fraudulent feature, we've decided on the latter.

This doesn't affect at all the IP/UA filtering feature mentioned by @osmiumman they're not linked and the IP/UA filter is used to filter known bots by Voluum and allows customers to block any other unwanted traffic.

We are aware that the change is made with short notice and may cause problems to some customers using this feature in a legitimate way. We're handling all that reports case by case and if you are also somehow affected by it please contact Voluum support team (preferably via the support widget in Voluum panel).

Regards,
Aleksander

06-13-2017 08:33 AM #4 musketeer (Member)

Unbelievably terrible timing especially for those of us in transit to Berlin. The email also hit my promotions inbox.....

06-14-2017 12:00 PM #5 nickpeplow (AMC Alumnus)
"we have detected that you are using the IP and/or UA rules"

The fact they consider IP & User Agent filtering to be a viable method of cloaking in 2017 just shows how out of touch with the industry they are. This update with have no impact on any Facebook affiliates, as a cloaker is required.

06-14-2017 12:14 PM #6 thepinkcat (Senior Member)

Quote Originally Posted by nickpeplow View Post
The fact they consider IP & User Agent filtering to be a viable method of cloaking in 2017 just shows how out of touch with the industry they are. This update with have no impact on any Facebook affiliates, as a cloaker is required.
There's no way to do FB without a cloaker?

06-15-2017 09:37 AM #7 lsolovey (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by nickpeplow View Post
The fact they consider IP & User Agent filtering to be a viable method of cloaking in 2017 just shows how out of touch with the industry they are. This update with have no impact on any Facebook affiliates, as a cloaker is required.

There's definitely more to the story than "they consider IP & User Agent filtering to be a viable method of cloaking in 2017."

One way this feature would be useful to affiliates is they'd use Voluum's IP/UA filter to redirect obvious FB datacenter clicks before they even reach the cloaker, thereby saving some click costs on the cloaker.

I doubt this is meant to directly have an impact on affiliates but it seems like there's something else behind the scenes. Maybe they think Voluum helps, in some way, to farm FB IP lists en masse. Obviously I don't know the story here but I don't think what's being sold here is the full story.

The only thing I can gather so far is FB threatened to ban Voluum links/domains/subdomains/IPs/servers unless Voluum removed this feature and Voluum complied in order to prevent an exodus from its platform.

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