Cannot any longer retrieved YouTube titles

[patrickemin]

@tobiaseigen

I noticed your site URL is unusual - it has no subdomain. A long shot, but maybe that is causing the problem?

Well, I don’t know what a normal website is. For me, a “normal” website is one that has a domain name. So there’s a domain name, a dot, and then an extension. That’s the case with my website. Subdomains are the exception rather than the rule (around 3%) when building websites. But in any case, I don’t think this has anything to do with my problem with YouTube video titles not appearing systematically.

[tobiaseigen]

You’re probably right that this is not related, but I don’t know how to help you further. I am grasping at straws!

If I remember correctly, a subdomain is recommended because not all registrars support going without it. See:

Configure your hosted Discourse site to run at the root or apex domain (e.g. example.com)

Most hosted discourse instances are on a subdomain: forum.example.com talk.example.com www.example.com This is our general recommendation in almost all cases, and it works great. However, if you wish to use a root domain or apex domain for your hosted discourse, like so example.com this turns out to be surprisingly difficult in a hosting scenario, due to the vagaries of how DNS works. It is possible, however, you must use a DNS provider that specifically supports it! DNS prov…

[Ed_S]

My forum (updated within past 7 days) also has no subdomain. This url pasted into a title works for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQUnHEgKlUE

This other example does not work well.
https://youtu.be/Jh0jPUBP9Iw?si=s9wQGHPF1rryNyED

[itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma)]

I suspect this could be due to the server where this site is hosted being denied or throttled by YouTube themselves?

[patrickemin]

This could be a possibility if the problem were constant, but that is not the case at all. I was able to successfully test this feature for many months without any issues. Then it stopped working for a few weeks, and then started working again. So the fact that my site has a subdomain or the type of server I use has nothing to do with this problem.

[itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma)]

From your description, it seems like a classic case of your server’s IP being throttled by YouTube, it was working, then YouTube felt something suspicious (possibly an AI false positive) then your IP was rate limited for some time, this is when you were unable to get any embeds to work. Maybe they released the IP after a review or the ban period expired when you were able to get it working again.

I don’t have enough data to prove this but there are reports floating around here about similar rate limiting from other social platforms due to the AI surge or other reasons.

[merefield (Robert)]

This is why this plugin exists:

"Onebox Assistant", crawl for those previews reliably!

What it does [A woman in a straw hat and khaki shirt is using binoculars to observe something in a mountainous area, with a clipboard nearby. (Captioned by AI)] Turns this kind of result: [image] (where your server has failed to bring back the page source so cannot extract the required tags to build the onebox) Into this!: [image] It simply provides an alternative path for onebox to get its page source with which to look for meta-data when the target server refuses your connection. It …

And in general why professional crawling API services exist …

In order to hand over the job of reliably returning metadata to professionals whose specialist job it is.