Amazon Onebox Broken?

Seems to be broken even on meta…

https://www.amazon.com/Mad-Max-Fury-Blu-ray-UltraViolet/dp/B00XQ141W8/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1781450633

Produces:

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Amazon seem to have removed their meta property og: tags.

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It depends on the volume of links you are dealing with. If relatively few, consider getting yourself and affiliate account and use their affiliate links which include graphics (then earn a small peppercorn income to boot).

I was considering integrating these affiliate snippets into our Custom Mentionables plugin, but not had the funding/bandwidth to do this yet.

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Oneboxing Amazon is plain horrible. Sometimes there is no nice previews generated, sometimes none at all, and what annoys me most right now but I can’t even identify the appropriate topic here, is that oneboxing Amazon Referall links will yield a result that bears not referall parameters when clicking on oneboxed elements…

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I feel your pain. Its quite frustrating. Our members share multiple links to Amazon products with each other on a daily basis (not affiliate / referral, just ‘regular’ links) and we see very mixed results from sometimes working, other times not, it’s completely pot luck.

As per the many threads on this subject here though, the issue is not with Discourse it’s with Amazon.

What could Discourse do about it? :thinking:

Without writing a dedicated scraper just for Amazon and building a onebox the hard way, probably not a lot. And if they write one for Amazon it could be a floodgate situation where everyone is suddenly asking for every website to have some bespoke onebox code :confused:

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I think consistency would help. So either not onebox it on principle and explain why, or do a very simple/basic box but definitely NOT change the Url or its parameters, that’s like taking money out of my purse…

The issue is somewhat moot.

Oneboxing Amazon links is against the T&Cs of their affiliate agreement apparently. My account was closed once because of it. Apparently use of their logo in a way they don’t sanction is misuse of their trademark?

They are probably actively blocking some user agents from crawling.

The best solution is to use their affiliate snippets. Agree this is a bit of a manual pfaff.

Maybe someone could fund or write a plugin to insert these snippets if they could be retrieved by api?

If you are not an affiliate consider using my onebox assistant to improve the tag retrieve reliability.

After updating to 2.9.0.beta2 it no longer works… example:

https://www.amazon.com/Venicor-Beware-Hamsters-Sign-Accessories/dp/B08HWGJMSH

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You can add the amazon domain to the setting blocked onebox domains.

2 posts were split to a new topic: “blocked onebox domains” setting not respected

Thanks, seems fixed now here on meta :smiley:

Issue fixed per

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Thank you! I was also experiencing no Amazon links oneboxing, and updating to tests-passed (685d186351) including that change that fixed most links for me when I rebuilt HTML for affected posts, except so far for one particular link:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5G1K36

I had already rebuilt redis as part of the update, but then in case of a transient error I also tried removing the onebox cache using redis-cli and rebuilding HTML again:

# redis-cli 
127.0.0.1:6379> keys *CACHE:onebox__https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5G1K36
1) "default:_CACHE:onebox__https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5G1K36"
127.0.0.1:6379> del default:_CACHE:onebox__https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5G1K36
(integer) 1
127.0.0.1:6379> keys *CACHE:onebox__https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5G1K36
(empty array)

(rebuild HTML)

127.0.0.1:6379> keys *CACHE:onebox__https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5G1K36
1) "default:_CACHE:onebox__https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5G1K36"

At least for me, on my site, that has remained a bare link, not boxed in any way. So this post is both a possible bug report and a test whether meta, presumably running similar code, is similarly affected. :relaxed:

(For reference: the single post with both working and not-working oneboxing after rebuilding HTML is at Indoor return laser fume handling? - #7 by mcdanlj - Laser Engravers/Cutters - Maker Forums)

Before applying this update, I saw Failed to onebox https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5G1K36 response size too big in log/rails/production.log but I don’t see any errors there when I try to rebuild html after deleting the item from the redis onebox cache. So it’s clearly something else.

The error I see for that link or this link https://www.amazon.com/Lennox-Carbon-Healthy-Climate-Filter/dp/B00E5G1K36 is:

Sorry, we were unable to generate a preview for this web page, because the following oEmbed / OpenGraph tag could not be found: description

but checking Iframely I can see the correct og tags:

{
  "url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5G1K36/ref=tsm_1_fb_lk",
  "title": "Lennox X7935 Carbon Clean Healthy Climate MERV 16 Filter (2 Pack)",
  "description": "Lennox X7935 Carbon Clean Healthy Climate MERV 16 Filter (2 Pack)",
  "image": "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/515Mvu2sfzL._SR600,315_PIWhiteStrip,BottomLeft,0,35_PIStarRatingFIVE,BottomLeft,360,-6_SR600,315_ZA383,445,290,400,400,AmazonEmberBold,12,4,0,0,5_SCLZZZZZZZ_FMpng_BG255,255,255.jpg"
}

@jamie.wilson

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Found another similar link that appears to be broken in the same way, in case it is useful to have extras for debugging without having to clear caches…

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FQ7M16H

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FQ7M16H

Both of those last two links are working for me, are you sure you aren’t just being blocked by Amazon?

@merefield given that both of the failing links fail both here and on Maker Forums, and that simultaneously other links now (after the request size limit increase to 5MB) work on both sites, that seems unlikely to me.

This topic was automatically closed after 14 days. New replies are no longer allowed.

The Amazon links that were failing to Onebox, such as the https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FQ7M16 example posted by @mcdanlj, should now render correctly.

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