The worst link setups we have seen

None of these were built carelessly. Each one made sense at the time and quietly stopped working.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

1. The five-hop chain

Ad to a shortener, shortener to a tracker, tracker to a landing page, landing page to another tracker, finally the store. Every hop was added by a different person solving a different problem.

Result: campaign parameters gone by hop three, several hundred milliseconds of latency, and the same blank page at the end. Fix: one hop, parameters attached at the last step.

2. Two store buttons in a bio

An App Store button and a Play button side by side, because the team wanted to cover both platforms. Every visitor has to choose, half of them choose wrong on an unfamiliar device, and the iOS button fails anyway.

Fix: one address that detects the platform.

3. The two-year-old email template

A welcome sequence written once and never opened again, ending in a raw store link. It had been sending everyone who opened it in the Gmail app to a blank page for as long as anyone could remember.

4. QR codes on packaging pointing at a service that expired

Dynamic QR codes on printed material, generated through a service that stopped being paid for. The codes still scan and now lead nowhere. Nothing can be done except reprint.

Fix: print codes that point at a domain you own, whatever generates them.

5. Detection written before iOS 26

A custom escape script, correct when it was built, checking only for FBAV in the user agent. After some Facebook builds stopped adding it, that traffic was classified as Safari and sent the plain link.

Fix: treat unmarked iOS traffic as possibly in-app and run the escape anyway, since it costs nothing when you are wrong.

The common thread

Every one of these was correct when built. Link setups decay because the platforms underneath them move, and nothing alerts you when they do.