Topics that are only images have [image] as the meta description

meglio · June 23, 2015, 11:10am

I’ve got this meta tag with a few [image] found in it and nothing more - it’s really useless:

Google Webmaster tool isn’t happy about it either:

Mittineague · June 23, 2015, 6:06pm

Agreed, if the post is nothing but images and has no text content IMHO the meta description tag should either be not used or have an empty content attribute value

codinghorror · October 16, 2018, 10:35pm

I wonder about this, I have seen [image] as well, we should verify that the alt image text is used in the post excerpt extractor when possible (when it is specified). For example in a typical image upload..

Can you take this as a to-do @techAPJ, let’s verify the behavior is correct. The rendered HTML above is

<img src="https://img.gif" alt="simmons" width="198" height="300">

techAPJ · October 17, 2018, 9:27am

Verified that alt image text is used in post excerpt as per:

github.com/discourse/discourse

lib/excerpt_parser.rb

acd1693da


      
              else
                return characters(attributes["alt"])
              end
            end
          
            unless @strip_images
              # If include_images is set, include the image in markdown
              characters("!") if @markdown_images
          
              if !attributes["alt"].blank?
                characters("[#{attributes["alt"]}]")
              elsif !attributes["title"].blank?
                characters("[#{attributes["title"]}]")
              else
                characters("[#{I18n.t 'excerpt_image'}]")
              end
          
              characters("(#{attributes['src']})") if @markdown_images
            end
          
          when "a"

The post just above as seen on your activity page:

Also, based on my local testing I noticed that in some cases we were showing blank meta description. Fixed that issue via:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/42c405a8200f9e481bcd64a18beabed9a8dea8d4

Topic		Replies	Views
Images in topic excerpts Product Support	9	986	May 19, 2020
Image title and alt tags not displaying Product Support	9	4909	October 9, 2019
Automatically add a relevant alt image attribute Feature	12	1538	April 8, 2024
Editing image alternative (alt) text Announcements new-feature	4	1716	June 11, 2022
Add ALT tag to images Product Support	6	242	April 10, 2025

Topics that are only images have [image] as the meta description

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