Dynamic Open Graph images for topics?

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I’ve seen a few disparate topics related to this subject, but I’d be curious to know if there has been any consideration for generating dynamic Open Graph images for topics similar to Reddit.

When links to my community are shared, I’m thinking about the best visual to represent all links and it can be hard. Should it be a CTA to join? Preview of what’s inside? Something generic that just shows the name of my community? I think all are good answers…depending on the link being shared.

Solving at least for question #2, it would be great if Discourse would dynamically generate the Open Graph image for the topic that was a preview of the topic (e.g. title, category, tags, maybe user profile picture, etc.)

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What do you mean by “dynamic”? The thumbnails are already sent depending on the Topic contents.

When I share a Topic from my forum, the Open Graph thumbnail shows the image associated with that specific Topic (if one exists) and if not it will use the graphic from the branding Settings as a fallback.

Here are examples of both, one without a Topic thumbnail, and one with:

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image366×785 127 KB

This works out of the box.

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Great clarifying question! This would be for topics without images, and also where you don’t want images to be the default used.

Here’s some examples of what a Reddit link looks like when a link to a specific comment is shared, for example. I would assume these are generated dynamically, creating Open Graph images that are directly relevant to the content being shared (e.g. in the case of Discourse, a topic title, category, tag, etc. or for a post, possibly an excepert, their username, the category, etc.)

This image shows a Reddit post discussion where one user comments about a new developer who was allegedly caught trying to take the source code of the company's main product app home on their first day, prompting the question "People who've seen someone get fired on the first day, why were they fired?" (Captioned by AI)
This image shows a Reddit post discussion where one user comments about a new developer who was allegedly caught trying to take the source code of the company's main product app home on their first day, prompting the question "People who've seen someone get fired on the first day, why were they fired?" (Captioned by AI)1284×1885 297 KB

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Thanks! I understand more about you want now.

Well as you can see, the preview excerpt text is already included (whether or not you have images)

You are proposing having thumbnails auto-generated to depict the text of the conversation including elements of the interface.

That would currently be a duplication of sorts?

I’m not a great fan of text as images, but that’s me.

But for sure, maybe we could have that added as an option?

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For sure. Specifically, generating an appealing Open Graph image to be used as the og:image url.

Ah yes, we all have our ideas! I find our community is looking for something like this (which I agree with) and I see much better click-through rates on these in the business/enterprise world versus random images.

It would be great to have a framework for generating these in Discourse, similar to GitHub’s approach:

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Any updates on this?

I was just thinking how much I’d love this as a way to generate interest when sharing on Whatsapp/Twitter/IG/LI/etc, so that with just a sharing of a link, people 1) know a conversation is happening and 2) might switch from conversing on the social media platform to the Discourse forum.

Or anyone have any ideas on how hard this would be to create?