Thanks for reporting this! Sorry I haven't posted a response to it in weeks!
As of last night the clc.stackoverflow.com
links redirect to the correct location. We still haven't fixed the real issue, but the links work now which is a first step.
So, what's the actual issue here?
The application's feed is powered by a specific API server which resides at mobile.stackexchange.com
. This server handles the non-public-API parts of our app, like user registration and the code for the feed.
The feed gets its recommended jobs from our Ad Server team. The Ad Server team recently needed to do some restructuring of the internal API they provide the rest of the company. The Mobile.SE server talks to this Ad Server API to pull in the recommended job items that you see.
That data request from the Ad Server API, and all other work on keeping your feed "fresh" happens via background tasks that run every day to update potential feed items for the app's users. When you pull to refresh if there's anything in the sampling of potential feed items ready for you, it gets put in your real feed.
For some reason, the changes I made to the Mobile.SE server to get it to talk to the new route aren't working. I've been trying to figure out what actually is going wrong with it for weeks.
It's a really complicated flow to test because I can't just tell the server "please refresh my feed and give me new job items". Because the actual flow works via background processes that run in batches in the middle of the night, the best I could do was testing the steps of the flow.
When I test the individual parts of the multi-step process all the specific parts seem to work on their own. It's just, when it's all together, it doesn't work for some reason.
That said, I think I've drilled the problematic part of the flow down to the "saving of potential feed items" I mentioned above. Because it seems that no new job recommendations are being saved into the pool of "potential feed items", the mobile.SE API is returning really old "potential feed job ads", which include click through links to clc.stackoverflow.com
.
The Ad Server team last night pushed a hotfix to make those clc.stackoverflow.com
links redirect to the real URL they were supposed to go to.
Hopefully, If I'm on the right track this time, I can fix the real root cause of this issue in the next few days.