I’m very interested too. I have the same issue on my discourses forum…
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I was going to wait until fully resolved, but a quick update for you all.
Vimeo support did indeed confirm a blanket-ban on many different cloud hosting provider IP ranges.
I asked to be whitelisted / excluded from that ban. I had to jump through several hoops and answer some questions on a form about intended usages etc, but yesterday I had a message from them that said they were speaking to their “Security and Reliability Engineering Team” to whitelist our IPs.
I’ll post a proper update/details here when fully resolved.
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Fair play to Vimeo support, they have indeed whitelisted our Digital Ocean droplet IP address.
And in testing, the same URL as used in this thread, you’ll see it failed in all previous tests and worked perfectly on the last one just now:
Just to expand on this, I had to create a public post on our Discourse, with the failed embedded video URL visible and send them the URL to said post. I marked that post as unlisted.
I also had to verify that the IP address of our site was static (seemed an odd question).
And lastly, I had to provide a few paragraphs explaining what our intended use case was for wanting to embed videos in our site.
The whole process took just three days from start to finish 
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So @PaigeLynn I am curious how you ever got this working, since Vimeo was clearly blacklisting entire server IP ranges. It had nothing to do with Discourse at all.
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Very useful post thanks!
I’ve just had exactly the same issue on a server that in the past has been working fine. Vimeo was actually quite responsive & IPs had been opened up again within 12hrs of my first support request. I’m on DigitalOcean
For anyone raising this issue to vimeo, My request pretty much contained the following:
I’m not able to embed Vimeo videos on my site and I’ve run a couple of tests and think my server address is being blocked.
and then I used the wget test @Richie showed below using my own server responses.
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Excellent news
And for completeness, when using wget on my Digital Ocean instance now, the 403:Forbidden error is now gone:
xx@xx:~# wget https://vimeo.com/65107797
--2019-10-06 15:25:19-- https://vimeo.com/65107797
Resolving vimeo.com (vimeo.com)... 151.101.192.217, 151.101.0.217, 151.101.128.217, ...
Connecting to vimeo.com (vimeo.com)|151.101.192.217|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 125476 (123K) [text/html]
Saving to: 65107797
65107797 100%[========================>] 122.54K --.-KB/s in 0.007s
2019-10-06 15:25:20 (17.4 MB/s) - â65107797â saved [125476/125476]
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I’m having the same issue. Vimeo after many responses back and forth wrote this. I don’t understand the response and I don’t know how to fix it.
From Vimeo Support:
Understood, thanks for the information. I did some research about the Onebox plugin, and from what I can tell from the plugin’s GitHub page, it’s retrieving metadata from Vimeo using unsupported methods.
To retrieve metadata from Vimeo, we recommend using our oEmbed implementation. The Onebox developer will need to update their plugin to support oEmbed. Additionally, usage of oEmbed will not be affected by the IP address ban.
Sorry to say, but since the plugin is retrieving metadata from Vimeo in an unsupported way, we cannot whitelist your IP address at this time. To work around the IP block, you’ll need to request Onebox update their plugin, or seek out another plugin that utilizes oEmbed to get Vimeo metadata.
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Are you able to wget the Vimeo page from the server itself, to confirm the IP address is blacklisted?
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I don’t know how to interpret this but it looks blocked to me!
Vimeo thinks that the developer needs to update the onebox plugin
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Hi, I’m Tommy and I’m a developer support specialist at Vimeo – I recently replied to Steve above, and in all likelihood handled IP address whitelist requests from other users who have posted here in the past few weeks. I wanted to provide some information here so that developers and website owners encountering Vimeo errors related to IP blocks know what to expect and how to resolve their issue.
We have some blocked IP addresses on some cloud host providers. For security purposes we cannot publicly disclose which cloud hosting providers or which IP addresses on those providers are banned.
After making some changes on our backend last week, human users (such as clients using a VPN hosted by one of these cloud providers) should be able to solve a CAPTCHA challenge to gain Vimeo access and temporarily whitelist their IP address. Whitelisting IP addresses manually by contacting us at Vimeo should no longer be necessary, though we’re always happy to clarify and guide you in the right direction.
What seems to be happening on Discourse, and specifically when using the Onebox library, is that Onebox tries to get Vimeo video metadata in an unsupported way (based on what I’m seeing here). Officially, Vimeo doesn’t support the og tags for widespread public consumption. Instead, we recommend using our oEmbed implementation to get that same metadata (embed code, thumbnail image, video url, etc.)
Using oEmbed or the full-fledged Vimeo API is generally not subject to the same IP block – using oEmbed or the Vimeo API are the only supported methods for servers to get and interact with data on Vimeo. Discourse will need to modify the Onebox library accordingly to use oEmbed instead.
The Vimeo oEmbed implementation is documented here: Working with oEmbed: Embedding Videos | Vimeo Developer
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Thanks for letting us know what’s going on.
I don’t know how to ask this without sounding rude, but if you don’t support OG tags, why send them?
This has worked for years and just stopped. Discourse does have site-specific one-boxes for other sites, so presumably someone will do that, but here’s what my client, who has a video-intensive site with lots of vimeo content, said:
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I’m not an engineer here so I can’t comment on changing the onebox implementation myself, but I do agree that it makes it very difficult for developers to know you don’t support something that’s supposed to be an open standard for open use.
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So you’re blocking the use of some (of your self-supplied) metadata on some IP addresses of some cloud providers. People who run into issues can solve this by simply using other metadata, or other IP addresses, or other cloud providers.
There is only one thing left to ask.
Why? In heaven’s name, why?
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Hey Justin, I’m also not a developer, but I work very closely with our developer and product teams here. You ask a good question and I’m going to run it past our team to get more concrete information regarding OG tag support for third parties.
Like everyone else I don’t like non-answers and I’d hate to leave a bad impression of Vimeo with Discourse here. Will get back to you guys soon with some answers.
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@tommypenner, thank you for joining this community to help solve this issue. I have many educational videos on my discourse site and have an embedded video is critical.
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@tommypenner, are there any updates? My Discourse site is relies on Vimeo for videos.
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Just ran across this thread and would like to add my dismayed voice to the others here – my forum’s IP (hosted on @michaeld’s Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting) ) has apparently been blocked as well … Vimeo embeds stopped working a while back, and until just now, I couldn’t figure out why.
We don’t post a LOT of Vimeo vids, but I specifically paid for Pro JUST to embed vids on my site, and now that doesn’t work. 
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Did you point your engineers to this topic?
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We can move your forum to a non-blocked IP. Just contact our support (support@discoursehosting.com) with the name of your forum.
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That’s a fine idea, but doesn’t it seem clear that any IP you move to will soon be blocked if they keep embedding Vimeo?
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