Users report issues with YouTube embedding after a site update, particularly with youtu.be links and /shorts videos not generating oneboxes. Carleas found that disabling the “Block onebox on redirect” setting resolved youtu.be issues but not /shorts links. Patrickemin confirmed the fix worked except for shorts. Nat investigated and ruled out recent code changes, noting that SiteSetting.block_onebox_on_redirect is false by default and that Google’s deprecation of URL shorteners might be related. Shauny confirmed /shorts don’t embed on their site, but some shorts do work on others. Nat asked for an example, and Carleas observed that embedded shorts often show a preview image, while non-embedded ones do not. NateDhaliwal clarified that the preview is in Markdown mode, not WYSIWYG.
I updated my site today (from_version: c6782e8434f404f30de8cba054dfeac004663981), and since then have been having issues with youtube embedding.
The first issue I noticed is that youtu.be links weren’t generating a onebox, while youtube.com links still worked. After playing around for a bit, I disabled the “Block onebox on redirect” setting, which fixed the issue for youtu.be links, although I need to rebuilt HTML on old posts.
And /shorts/ links still aren’t working, even if I rebuild the HTML.
No errors in logs, nothing else I’ve noticed broken.
Not sure if it’s related, but in trying to troubleshoot I also noticed that trying to disable the ‘Lazy videos’ plugin gives an error: “An error occurred: You are not allowed to change hidden settings: lazy_videos_enabled”
I don’t think there’s anything to do here on our end.
All sites have SiteSetting.block_onebox_on_redirect false by default. Meta does so too, so most sites that don’t touch this setting would have youtu.be and /shorts resolving as per normal.
Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025. We recommend transitioning these links to another URL shortener provider.
While it mentions only goo.gl, I am not surprised if under the hood youtube links have also been made to undergo some sort of redirection moving forwards.
For posterity, here is a youtu.be and a /shorts link rendering fine
It looks like some shorts work on my site, but not all. For example, @nat’s ‘The Twins’ short gets embedded properly, but @Shauny’s does not.
And, not sure if this is relevant, but another difference I noticed between them is that Natalie’s shows a picture in the WYSIWYG preview and Shaun’s does not:
