Suppress false-positive dead clicks across all video players

[posthog]

Summary

The merch launch video (#18431) caused the /merch page's $dead_click rate to spike from July 14: clicks on the Wistia player (play/pause, video body, scrubber) change playback state without the DOM mutation / navigation / scroll that PostHog's dead-click heuristic looks for, so a working video registered as false-positive $dead_click events.

That false positive isn't specific to merch — it applies to every interactive video player on the site. So the fix is now applied at the shared component level rather than only on the merch page.

Fix

ph-no-deadclick tells posthog-js's dead-click detector to skip capture when the class is on the clicked element or any ancestor (it's in the default ignore list, and the project's remote config has captureDeadClicks: true). Normal autocapture is unaffected — it mirrors the existing rageclick tuning in posthog-init.js.

• WistiaEmbed — carries the class itself, covering merch and all other embeds (/code, /r/product-analytics, /slack, and MDX <WistiaEmbed> usages).
• WistiaVideo and WistiaCustomPlayer — class added on their root wrappers (home demos, MCP page, wizard, product slides, /data-stack).
• MerchVideoCard reverts to its original wrapper — the shared component handles it now.

Deliberately left alone, after checking each: ProductVideo (native <video>, mostly autoPlay muted loop with no controls — nothing to misclick), TypecaastPlayer (isolated shadow-root typing animation, not a scrubbable player), and TapePlayer (audio, not video).

Why

The video isn't broken — the metric was being inflated by ordinary video interaction, which masked genuine dead clicks and made the surface hard to monitor. Suppressing it at the player level restores a meaningful signal across the whole site, not just on merch.

Note on scope

A separate, pre-existing lower-volume pattern on /merch (clicks on the frozen body behind the product Drawer's scroll lock — body[pointer-events:none][data-scroll-locked]) also contributes to merch-page dead clicks. It predates the regression and isn't the driver, so it's intentionally left out and worth a separate look.

Test plan

• On /merch and another Wistia page (e.g. /code), click the player (play, pause, scrub) and confirm no $dead_click events fire for the player, while other autocapture continues.
• Confirm videos still play/pause/scrub exactly as before (marker class only; no behavior change).

---

Created with PostHog Code from an inbox report.

[github-actions]

Deploy preview

Status	Details	Updated (UTC)
🟢 Ready	View preview	Jul 16, 2026 09:31AM

[github-actions]

Bundle report

Total JS (gzip)

6.31 MiB (+0.3 KiB / +0.0%)

Eager graph (modules shipped in each entrypoint's initial chunks)

Entrypoint	Eager size	Budget	Modules
✅ app	15.60 MiB (+2.6 KiB / +0.0%)	report-only	1945

Largest modules in the app closure

Module	Size
css ./node_modules/.pnpm/css-loader@5.2.7_webpack@5.101.3/node_modules/css-loader/dist/cjs.js??ruleSet[1].rules[8].oneOf[1].use[1]!./node_modules/.pnpm/postcss-loader@4.3.0_postcss@8.5.6_webpack@5.101.3/node_modules/postcss-loader/dist/cjs.js??ruleSet[1].rules[8].oneOf[1].use[2]!./src/styles/global.css	711.1 KiB
./src/components/Stickers/Stickers.tsx	696.4 KiB
./.cache/caches/gatsby-plugin-mdx/mdx-scopes-dir/31a094f140f119e73085d847ae81b99b.js + 2 modules	629.5 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/@radix-ui+react-icons@1.3.2_react@18.3.1/node_modules/@radix-ui/react-icons/dist/react-icons.esm.js	481.4 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/rehype-raw@7.0.0/node_modules/rehype-raw/lib/index.js + 29 modules	395.1 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/@posthog+icons@0.36.6_react-dom@18.3.1_react@18.3.1__react@18.3.1/node_modules/@posthog/icons/dist/posthog-icons.cjs.js	364.8 KiB
./src/hooks/useCustomers.tsx + 54 modules	355.1 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/@posthog+icons@0.36.6_react-dom@18.3.1_react@18.3.1__react@18.3.1/node_modules/@posthog/icons/dist/posthog-icons.es.js	354.8 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/react-markdown@8.0.7_@types+react@16.14.66_react@18.3.1/node_modules/react-markdown/lib/react-markdown.js + 88 modules	351.4 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/cloudinary-core@2.14.0_lodash@4.17.21/node_modules/cloudinary-core/cloudinary-core.js	281.9 KiB
./src/components/ProductComparisonTable/index.tsx + 120 modules	278.5 KiB
./node_modules/.pnpm/d3@7.9.0/node_modules/d3/src/index.js + 208 modules	247.4 KiB
./src/components/Pricing/PricingSlider/Slider.tsx + 87 modules	239.9 KiB
./gatsby-browser.tsx + 41 modules	239.8 KiB
./src/components/SearchUI/index.tsx + 73 modules	223.4 KiB

---

Eager-graph budgets are report-only until a baseline is established. Sizes are gzip of public/**/*.js; eager size is webpack module source bytes for the modules actually shipped in the entrypoint's initial chunks (post-tree-shake).

[andyvan-ph]

@smallbrownbike PostHog flagged this deadclick problem after the merch video went live and I figured it was probably a an issue everywhere.