I’ve never developed with Ruby before so I’m struggling to understand why OneBox is returning with a blank preview from our link, when iFramely and Slack render it fine. Here is a sample link we are trying to render, it has been whitelisted in our Discourse instance. https://link.jig.space/kEhFbFwkcW A working iFramely link is here: Welcome to Iframely It extracts the appropriate open graph tags to make the preview. We are using branch.io as our link shortener, with some intelligent redirects if the user is on iOS and has our app installed then it opens the app, but if they’re on desktop it goes to our microsite https://jig.space. Could this have something to do with why OneBox can’t infer the open graph tags while iFramely can? I tried putting a few puts in the code to figure out why OneBox returns a 404 when previewing our links, and although the Discourse codebase is easy enough to read, I’m too new with Ruby to investigate further. It would be an awesome feature to have some kind of debug flag for OneBox with more verbose logging as it seems lots of people on here (including me!) have some confusions about how oEmbed and Open Graph are supposed to work. Could anyone help me debug OneBox further or let me know of any tools to figure this out?

[image] JezPez: JigSpace: The world’s highest-rated AR presentation app Faceboook og debugger throws a couple of warnings: [image] [image] Sharing Debugger - Meta for Developers Not sure if that’s what’s upsetting onebox

A curl request responds with html which seems like it’s actually rendering the whole card. curl -X GET https://link.jig.space/gXszoFiWkX Macintosh - Complete JigSpace Macintosh - Complete Apple Macintosh Computer If OneBox’s issue is the image issue which FB is complaining about, then we should add the FB open graph debugger to the OneBox docs thread: Creating rich link previews with Onebox I’ll try to put in the og:image:width and such as FB suggests. Thanks @merefield.

I feel your pain in general though. When oneboxing fails could we have some additional logging to say exactly why it is turning its nose up?

Yeah it’s just that I can’t follow the code past here: lib/oneboxer.rb 102be5a9e max_width: 695, sanitize_config: Sanitize::Config::DISCOURSE_ONEBOX } options[:cookie] = fd.cookie if fd.cookie if Rails.env.development? && SiteSetting.port.to_i > 0 Onebox.options = { allowed_ports: [80, 443, SiteSetting.port.to_i] } end r = Onebox.preview(uri.to_s, options) { onebox: r.to_s, preview: r&.placeholder_html.to_s } end end end Then later on in the onebox_controller.rb, preview.blank is true. I’m pretty new to Ruby so just trying to figure out how to go deeper and output the options passed into Onebox.preview etc.

byebug is extremely useful. It’s already included in the project I believe, so just put the command ‘byebug’ on it’s own line of the code and the console will pop into the code at that point. Type any variable to find it’s value. Use commands ‘next’, ‘step’ and ‘up’ to get around. ‘continue’ to set it off on its merry way. It’s a bit like ‘debugger’ in javascript. This is an extreme length to go to for a failing onebox though! :slight_smile: (but a great educational exercise nonetheless ).

I didn’t realise onebox is it’s own gem. I’ve just discovered the onebox repo and it has some awesome points: https://github.com/discourse/onebox Reading the readme there: I should be able to make an engine myself to get around any og tag issues. I can’t see any onebox option for a debug flag or anything. So I guess that is the suggestion I’m making here: There should be a debug:true or verbose:true option to pass into onebox to understand some common issues.

Yup it’s a ‘separate’ project. I’m in complete agreement about the logging. This should be verbose by default for all failures. We shouldn’t be having to break into the code to see what’s going on: it’s too common a Production problem. Facebook og debug is a nice extra, but onebox has made the decision or failed the preview using it’s own rules and it should be transparent about when it does so - perhaps I’m missing something? I obviously respect the platform’s priorities, but it would be great if this was addressed.

Does it have actual text? Image only oneboxes aren’t supported.

Hi @codinghorror! What do you mean by actual text? As an example here are some of the meta og tags returned from https://link.jig.space/gXszoFiWkX The og data renders like this in Slack: [image] In iframely they render it like this: [image] So I wouldn’t say it’s just the image, though it is just those three tags used so there’s not much text.

My guess is you don’t meet our minimum text content requirement for the onebox.

Onebox requests being incorrectly redirected due to user-agent

Product Support

merefield (Robert) June 17, 2019, 11:00am 17

User agent is found here:

Topic		Replies	Views
Onebox Does Not Display - iFramely Passes Product Support	3	1426	May 2, 2019
Onebox issue with a specific site Product Support onebox	13	1877	January 31, 2019
Quickly explain what Onebox is? UX	12	12216	July 3, 2026
Incorrect or failing oneboxes for links to other discourse instances Bug	16	2511	August 17, 2017
Onebox error but OG tag present Product Support	2	592	January 3, 2021

Onebox requests being incorrectly redirected due to user-agent

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