Link Previews Still Broken 😿 Upvote on Github!

Snowbird · August 17, 2021, 5:46am

This issues was brought up 2.5 years ago, and it seems like it is still happening. I was hopeful that the hard work to improve google search results would help this along but it seems it hasn’t.

As everyone who has been on the forum knows, when you post a link to a page on SuttaCentral.net in its own line in a forum post, it creates a generic looking link preview instead of a preview of the specific sutta being linked to. Like so:

https://suttacentral.net/mn21/en/sujato

I have tried posting the same link to another discourse based forum and I get identical results. I also found a testing website that looks for the tags that are used to create these previews (opengraph.xyz) For example, the link I shared above tests like this:

Does anyone know if this is something that can be fixed? Since it seems to be a problem on the coding side of SuttaCentral.net, I don’t think it is anything I can help with other than testing. Does anyone at the @helpdesk-dd know the status of this?

I realize that dev time is limited, but I think this fix could really improve the usability of the forum, not to mention that it improves the clickability of shared suttas on other platforms.

BTW, Pasting a link inside a paragraph like this, SuttaCentral, also doesn’t work as it should. Imagine how cool it would be if we could paste that link and it automatically said MN 21 Kakacūpamasutta.

EDIT: I found this help page on Discourse, link is to the troubleshooting section: Create rich link previews with Onebox - users - Discourse Meta

If Onebox is not working as expected, please check the following:

Test your site by pasting the link into iFramely ; check that the target is using correct OpenGraph or oEmbed meta tags for content. And remember the description text is required in Discourse!

Verify that the onebox request to the target website has not been blocked by user-agent. Some WordPress hosts frequently block “unknown” user agents.

Testing using that site gives basically the same result.

EDIT2: Just found the link to the github for Onebox: GitHub - discourse/onebox: (DEPRECATED) A gem for turning URLs into website previews. If the problem can’t be solved on suttacentral.net’s side, perhaps something could be done to help Onebox pick up the data on the sc pages.

sujato · August 18, 2021, 2:08am

Please upvote or comment on these issues here:

github.com/suttacentral/suttacentral

Update SC's social sharing information

opened 10:31AM - 11 Sep 19 UTC

aminah-sc

Type: improvement

Following on from: https://github.com/suttacentral/suttacentral/issues/1400 … We now need to assign the generic og (open graphic) meta tag properties used by social sharing platforms and, if necessary, platform-specific tags as well. See the following for more on og here: http://ogp.me/ https://www.aira.net/open-graph-social-media-traffic/ #### Acceptance criteria (the list of things that need to be done for the ticket to be considered finished): - [ ] social sharing image has been updated - [ ] relevant meta tags have been added to sutta `<head>` eg: ``` <meta property="og:title" content="SUTTA TITLE"> <meta property="og:description" content="SUTTAPLEX BLURB"> <meta property="og:image" content="PATH/SOCIAL SHARING IMAGE.png> ``` Has been tested on: - [ ] Discourse - [ ] Pinterest - [ ] FB - [ ] LinkedIn - [ ] Twitter - [ ] Whatsapp

And let us know if anything needs to be added. The spec is quite thin for the moment, so please just throw in a comment anything that might be useful, we’ll refine the spec before starting.

Snowbird · August 18, 2021, 12:30pm

Thank you, Bhante. As far as what needs to be acomplished, it is really straightforward (says the person who doesnt really code!). The correct metadata just needs to end up in the og tags.

I’ll try to add whatever I can to the issue.

Are you asking folks to vote so you know how important it is to people? Im affraid most people dont have a Github account.

sujato · August 20, 2021, 8:49am

Lol, one upvote and it’ll still be the most upvotes! You have the power!

Snowbird · August 20, 2021, 12:27pm

Oh, that does deserve a sad kitty. It’s a stark reminder of how few people are carrying the coding burden of this great project.

If anyone does want to upvote, I think on Github they are called reactions. Unless I’m missing something.

Snowbird · February 4, 2022, 5:52am

It appears that now no link preview box is being created at all and just a link shows when one is pasted into a message:

https://suttacentral.net/mn87/en/sujato

This is what shows up in the preview:

At first I noticed it when pasting in the new format links that include display settings. But now it is happening on simple links too.

Is anyone else noticing this? Not sure if this is a @helpdesk-dd issue or not.

sujato · February 4, 2022, 6:06am

Yes, I’ve noticed that as well. Not sure what that issue is.

We’ve looked into the social preview problem and the fix is not trivial (insert technobabble here). We may be dependent on upstream improvements before this can happen. We’ve been looking at other things lately, but if there are any developers who want to take this on, let us know!

musiko · February 4, 2022, 7:20am

Here’s the mechanism behind Oneboxing of links:

Discourse uses Open Graph/ oEmbed discovery mechanism to create a rich link.

Here are the Open Graph

and oEmbed tests

for

https://suttacentral.net/mn87/en/sujato

musiko · February 4, 2022, 4:31pm

It seems likely that the meta data is not generated properly for all URIs? Were there any recent changes on the SuttaCentral side?

https://suttacentral.net
https://suttacentral.net
https://suttacentral.net/mn87

https://suttacentral.net/mn87/en
https://suttacentral.net/mn87/en
https://suttacentral.net/mn87/en/sujato
https://suttacentral.net/mn87/en/sujato

Snowbird · March 1, 2024, 6:21am

I just noticed that Google seems to be able to read the links now. What you are seeing is a link pasted into Google sheets:

And when I click yes, I get this:

Cool!