The discussion revolves around challenges with oneboxing in Discourse, particularly when websites lack Open Graph (OG) metadata. merefield notes that while OG is commonly used, some URLs—especially from older sites like UK local government pages—don’t support it, leading to failed previews. They reference Facebook’s ability to generate previews using raw HTML tags and question whether a similar fallback mechanism could be implemented in Discourse. ChrisBeach supports this idea, emphasizing the need for a basic fallback (like favicon and site title) to avoid confusion when links don’t render. merefield observes intermittent oneboxing failures, possibly due to rate limiting or caching, and notes that rebuilding the post doesn’t resolve the issue. codinghorror questions the prevalence of non-compliant sites, but ChrisBeach provides a concrete example: a Lewisham council page. John_Smith3 reports a 70% success rate and shares a link where oneboxing fails, prompting Stephen to suggest verifying OG data. merefield advises checking the page source and reaching out to webmasters to add OG tags, highlighting the importance of valid metadata for reliable oneboxing.
I’d also like to see this. Whilst it’s important to encourage OG adoption, we should have some kind of basic fallback (favicon, site title) so that Discourse users are not confused when they paste a URL into the title box and nothing happens.
Yeah, I’m about to try and encourage a “quick-fire” sharing community off of Facebook and support for previews is imho a really important aspect that needs to be solid (and one of the reasons I got involved in contributing to the TLP plugin).
Oh … I think I’ve found part of the problem … on multiple sites (even on Meta) I can reproduce this:
When I paste a link into Title it doesn’t always convert into a Title … sometimes you are left with a URL. This is an intermittent issue … is this rate limited locally or remotely, somehow? Interestingly, once it works, you can delete it and it will work again instantly … as if being cached?
Rebuilding the HTML of the first post does not fix the Title even if it’s still a URL.
NB I don’t see any javascript errors on console when this fails.
You could try curl https://private-island-tours.com | grep \"og: from your server as a quick check. If this comes back with no rows of source, you know you the page does not contain those tags or your server is being blocked from crawling.
In this case I cannot see the tags. You could reach out to the webmaster and encourage her to add them!
