What should I ask of a site that disallows OneBox crawls?
Attempts to OneBox for Bookshop.org book listings result in: “Sorry, we were unable to generate a preview for this web page, because the following oEmbed / OpenGraph tags could not be found: description, image” – despite the required OG tags being present on the destination page.
(At time of posting, the result here on meta is the same as my site):
https://bookshop.org/p/books/parable-of-the-sower-octavia-e-butler/19767724?ean=9781538732182
I’ve tried several OpenGraph validators:
- most report the URL unreachable.
- a couple of them retrieve a few OG fields from Bookshop.org, but nothing specific to the requested page.
- the iFramely debugger and the Facebook Sharing Debugger manage a full preview.
I’m gathering that Bookshop.org is rejecting some crawls. I’d rather not introduce a plugin workaround if there’s something appropriate I might ask Bookshop.org to do, e.g. “Please allow the Discourse user agent to crawl?”