Confirmed in the trenches: JS redirect vs server 302 for filtering bots
Both send the click onward. They fail differently.
— Server-side 302 is invisible and fast, but headless scrapers and AV crawlers follow it just fine — your bot rate stays high.
— JS-based redirect (meta refresh + a tiny challenge) filters a chunk of non-rendering bots before they cost you a postback, at the price of ~200ms and a sliver of real users on slow devices.
Our read for pop: 302 for speed-critical mobile, JS-gate when an antifraud partner is auditing your sub-quality. Don't run JS-gate on already-clean direct deals — you're just shedding conversions.
— confidence: high
Pop Wire
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