Embedded Posts: Link Preview only in Post

Feature request: Link preview only in body of embedded posts

I have a specific use scenario I can’t seem to solve in Discourse while I’m evaluation the platform. It seems like several other people are trying to accomplish the same thing as me.

I have the embedding feature working well and new “case” pages for my site create a forum post and add replies to my original site. The problems is the content of the forum post that is embedded. My original source site is React and I can’t seem to control what content to display through RSS.

What works perfectly is, if I post a url to the original source page, Discourse creates a beautiful preview of the page and links to it. How can I use that link preview as the content of my post?

It would be amazing if there was an Embed option to only post the link preview. I don’t need the actual content from the page included in my forum post. I just want conversational replies and users to get back to the source page if they need the content.

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This won’t solve your problem, but this is something that a few sites that publish WordPress posts to Discourse with the WP Discourse plugin wanted to accomplish. For that case, the WordPress plugin was able to provide a workaround.

To allow this to work with posts created with the Javascript embed code would require a new feature to be added to the core Discourse code. It might be a very useful feature for sites that struggle to get their external posts accurately displayed in Discourse topics.

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Possibly a plugin as well? I think support for this as a core feature would be appreciated.

It’s not my job anymore, but having helped sites configure this in the past, having a fallback to display a onebox link when an accurate representation of the post can’t be returned would sure have been appreciated. I think it’s a good feature request for the core Discourse code.

It could be accomplished with a plugin now if your site’s self-hosted.