Should onebox fall back on mini-onebox if no metadata is available?

Feature
1

I just realized that when I post this link with the intention to have it oneboxed:

https://cispe.cloud/publicregister/

it is rendered as an ordinary link because the website obviously doesn’t support OpenGraph. In cases where that happens, I tend to change the text so that the link becomes an inline link. And in that case it renders as a mini-onebox: https://cispe.cloud/publicregister/ Nice!

So I’m wondering: wouldn’t it make sense if the ordinary onebox would fall back on mini-onebox whenever no meta-data is available?

7 Likes
2

I am not sure this is relevant because mini one box is only supported for internal links by default in this release.

3

There is a very very easy workaround here, just add a space prior to the link.

https://cispe.cloud/publicregister/

  https://cispe.cloud/publicregister/

It should probably fallback if you have mini onebox enabled on all sites, and we may move to mini onebox enabled on all sites in a future release.

There is an element of risk cause some sites may have real bad metadata.

5 Likes
4

For what is worth, I noted this behavior by coincidence and I wasn’t sure about what was going on - see OneBox doesn't render boxes for Phabricator URLs.

The space trick is simple and very useful… once you know it. I had noted that (some? all?) external URLs show the page title when placed in the middle of a paragraph, but I hadn’t made an association to exploiting this feature as standalone link with an extra space.