Facebook oneboxes not working on my forums

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Facebook oneboxing hasn’t worked for a long time on my forums, but it did work in 2021.

I pretty much gave up, but after installing a development version of Discourse on my computer today, I noticed that Facebook oneboxes were working:

I also noticed it works on try.discourse and on meta.

However, it doesn’t work on unicyclist.com and forum.monocycle.info.

For example, if I try to post this link: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfbid036u4L3nsfpuufBVrA41MHiinbK5WMGLtgLnG1vQ6oHjQqwbSewJr3G2CjN5LADFQLl

It works here:

Mark Zuckerberg

But the result on my forum is always a Facebook box asking us to log-in: Forum to-do list - #19 by Canapin - Forum Feedback - Unicyclist.com

I don’t understand why Facebook oneboxes don’t work on these forum but it works on others.

Any idea? Couldn’t find any misconfigured setting.

[Falco]

@Canapin

I don’t understand why Facebook oneboxes don’t work on these forum but it works on others.

That’s usually due to your server IP reputation. Facebook doesn’t allow your server to get the HTML with the page and instead you are redirected to a login page.

You can try reproducing it with a cURL on the server.

On my desktop I get:

curl -s https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfbid036u4L3nsfpuufBVrA41MHiinbK5WMGLtgLnG1vQ6oHjQqwbSewJr3G2CjN5LADFQLl | htmlq 'meta[property^="og:"]'
<meta content="Mark Zuckerberg" property="og:title">
<meta content="👋🇫🇷🇪🇦 We're launching Horizon Worlds in France and Spain today! Looking forward to seeing people explore and build immersive worlds, and to bringing this to more countries soon." property="og:description">
<meta content="https://scontent.fcgh7-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/299150825_10114625396804361_144927942652991577_n.jpg?_nc_cat=1&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=8024bb&amp;_nc_ohc=YfDVgCX1ZkcAX8Zjdz8&amp;_nc_ht=scontent.fcgh7-1.fna&amp;oh=00_AT_alIn_B_hs9SgZj2MULpEABA2PWyNLoKyUkqGBmFkxzA&amp;oe=6324F6BB" property="og:image">
<meta content="https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10114625397253461" property="og:url">

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

That’s interesting information! A curl returns nothing on my servers.

Is there any way to circumvent this or increase my server IP reputation? Or am I stuck with no Facebook oneboxes?

[Falco]

You either move to a IP with better reputation or your rent an IP for outgoing oneboxes with "Onebox Assistant", crawl for those previews reliably!

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

I’ll have a look at Onebox Assistant, I used it for Youtube oneboxes during a migration….

I’m not familiar with IP “reputation” concept, but both my servers are hosted on Hetzner, which is, as far as I know, a reputable company. How do I know how reputable is an IP?

[Stephen]

You can only find out by testing sadly.