Koshin StudioI opened the links of displayed articles and compared them: about 60 mistakes, and three mistakes in my own first check
Development log of the Toreca Dash app / September 2026
The articles in my app Toreca Dash link to store and shopping-site pages. Even if an article’s title and price are right, if the linked page is closed or about a different product, it is no use to the user.
On the night of 15 September 2026, asked to “check the destination content too”, I actually opened the links of displayed articles and compared the content with the article: product, store, whether open, sale type, deadline and price. About 60 mistakes turned up.
Numbers come from my work log of 15 September 2026. The check itself made no writes; I fixed the findings separately.
How I checked
- X posts (361): 0 deleted. The text had been compared in earlier checks.
- Non-X (703, excluding Yahoo!): I read the destination directly or via the scraping service (with a Japanese IP) and judged with an AI. Amazon always goes through the scraping service.
My first version of the check got three things wrong:
- I opened Amazon from Singapore. Prices showed in Singapore dollars and I saw another seller, and judged that “wrong”.
- I read Rakuten as garbled text. I had not detected the character encoding (EUC-JP).
- I opened 501 Yahoo! pages six at a time. The production IP was refused with HTTP 489 (see another article). I stopped partway through Yahoo!.
If the checking tool is wrong, the count of “mistakes” inflates. I fixed encoding detection, opening Amazon from Japan, and judging only by stock of “this exact item”, then reran.
Mistakes found (about 60)
| What | Count | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon “invitation request” shown as pre-order or first-come | 10 | Make it a lottery |
| Amazon “pre-order” shown as first-come | 7 | Make it a reservation |
| Rakuten Books “pre-orders open” shown as first-come | 3 | Make it a reservation |
| Shops closed temporarily (Yahoo!) | 6 | Hide |
| Sold out or closed but still displayed | many | Hide |
| Link goes to a different store or an ended lottery | 3 | Go back to the store’s X post |
| Link goes to a different product | 2 | Hide |
| Price mismatch | about 10 | Correct |
| Empty store name | 1 | Fill in |
The most frequent was the wrong sale type. On Amazon there are “invitation requests”, neither first-come nor pre-order. Treating one as first-come means users cannot buy however fast they are. The earlier code only marked the invitation and did not correct the sale type.
Some sold-out pages did not match my sold-out wording. A Yahoo! sold-out page says “out of stock” on screen, but matched none of the keywords. So I now judge by the stock data embedded in the page for that item ("stock":{"isAvailable":false). The data is more reliable than the wording on screen.
“Opening the application link goes to the site’s top page”
Found in another check the same day. The QR code on a store’s lottery image pointed to a URL that, actually opened, redirects to the site’s top page, not an application page.
I added a check to the single gate that adopts application links. It opens the URL, and if the original URL has a path other than the top but the destination path is empty (or a file name that looks like a top page), it does not adopt it. If it cannot be read (403, timeout), it still adopts, since many stores use bot protection and unreadable is not a sign of badness. The same URL is held for 6 hours.
What I did not fix, and could not fix
It matters that I did not count everything found as a “mistake”. There are cases I checked and did not fix.
- Rakuten Ichiba “sold out”: the page data said in stock (a setting hides stock counts). The AI misread it.
- Amazon “See all buying options”: other sellers exist, so it is not necessarily sold out.
- Amazon English titles: auto-translated names; the product was right.
- 85 pages I could not read: Rakuten Ichiba (via ad links), membership sites, LINE, Google Forms and so on.
I keep results in three groups with reasons: fixed, not fixed, could not read. “Not fixed” needs a reason too.
What I learned
Even if title and price match, you cannot know until you open the link.
- Actually open the link. Looking only at the article cannot show that the destination is closed.
- Check the checking tool first. Country, encoding, parallelism: a wrong tool inflates “mistakes”.
- Embedded data beats screen wording. Judge sold-out by stock data, not text.
- Do not make everything found a “mistake”. Keep reasons for what you do not fix.
- Do not treat “could not read” as bad. Bot protection makes unreadable normal.
This is the English version of the original Japanese article.
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