The discussion revolves around the link preview feature in Discourse. Laurent initiated the conversation, suggesting that the feature be disabled at the admin level due to its inaccuracies and unnecessary emphasis on linked content. They provided examples of incorrect previews, including GitHub and Patreon links.
codinghorror responded, stating that a space can be added before the link to disable the preview. They also requested specific examples of incorrect previews, to which Laurent provided links to GitHub releases and Patreon articles.
supermathie suggested that instead of disabling the feature globally, Laurent could work with the link preview by adding metadata to the linked page or using alternative formatting options. They also mentioned that the GitHub link preview has been improved, and Laurent acknowledged this improvement.
The discussion highlights the ongoing efforts to improve Discourse’s features, including the link preview and theme components.
Link previews are more often wrong than right, often showing content unrelated to the URL (not Discourse fault, I know it’s very hard to sum up the content of a web page).
Also I think it gives too much weight to the URL - a link is usually for extra info, while with this feature that link often takes 95% of the post space, which is not only unnecessary, but also illogical. What’s important is the text content on the forum, not the content on another linked website.
As an example, a link to a GitHub page includes the owner’s avatar, which is irrelevant. If you link to a release, it won’t show the text of the release, but the “about” summary of the GitHub repo, which is also not relevant. This is true of many websites actually (noticed it with Patreon articles too) - the “summary” is often related to the entire website, not to the specific page.
So since, in my opinion, this feature doesn’t work so well, I would like to disable it at admin level for the entire website. Is there currently an option for this? I couldn’t find one, but I might have missed it.
It’s better, but about 50% of the box doesn’t matter: the image is off-topic, and the text that matters only starts towards the bottom - “The latest versions of Joplin adds support…”. It’s probably tricky to improve this, which is why I’m fine with not having the previews at all.
I see that the info box for GitHub has been largely improved. Now it shows a proper icon instead of the avatar, also a good summary of the issue as well as the tags, date and other metadata.
Thanks for the great work and for continuously improving Discourse!
