@tommypenner Since we’re seeing an influx of more users getting their sites blocked, can you whitelist Discourse sites requesting information until we get the technical details of this resolved, please? We’re more than happy to work with you on fixing this the right way, but not at the expense of our users.
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No, that is not the case - the IP’s seem blocked beforehand and in large ranges, regardless of whether there were Vimeo embeds:
We have previously moved a number of forums that were having issues to different IP blocks and (up until now) that permanently solved the problem for those forums.
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Hi all, my apologies for the radio silence. We’re discussing internally at Vimeo how we want to treat and support OG tag usage, so for now I don’t have any new information to share.
Originally OG tags were used on the video page intended for use by Facebook and other major social media platforms. Usecases like Discourse deployments on cloud-hosted servers weren’t situations we considered, but we are seriously considering these usecases now, especially since the cloud hosting IP bans we have in place are obviously affecting these OG tag users.
For now, the long-term solution on Discourse’s end is to utilize our oEmbed implementation to get video metadata instead of depending on OG tags.
All that said, at Vimeo we don’t want to “punish” any developers who were depending on Discourse’s ability to get Vimeo metadata. If you have deployed Discourse on your own cloud server and are encountering this issue, contact us at vimeo.com/help/contact, describe your situation, and provide a link to this Discourse thread for reference. From there, we’ll look into the feasibility of temporarily whitelisting your server’s IP address.
(Attention @justin and @RGJ: I’m not terribly familiar with Discourse and I didn’t see a way to DM you guys. Would love to talk further about how we can help out your users and developers. If there’s a way we can talk off Meta Discourse and via email or DM, let’s figure that out!)
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Noted. I’ll look into updating our onebox gem to use oEmbed endpoint for Vimeo videos next week.
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You can click on a username and then press the “message” button that appears in the popup.
I guess @techAPJ will come to our rescue.
I still don’t understand why you are blacklisting IP ranges from using your OG tags in the first place, so if you have anything to share about that, it would make us and our customers at least understand what is going on here. Is this putting more load on your servers than when we’d be using an oEmbed tag or something?
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If you don’t want people to use the og tags then an easy way to enforce that would be to not send them. It’s not like discourse is scraping your site. It’s using a public and open standard that you are advertising that you support.
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Done via:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/52c8cab7f2244598f478eec28bd978c035166c27
and
https://github.com/discourse/onebox/commit/e9c2bd46e3430a09ad7d69ed24032ccbc1522cce
Onebox now uses Vimeo oEmbed endpoint by default and should not be affected by server IP blacklisting.
Feel free to ping me here on meta if the issue persists on latest Discourse version.
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Backporting this to stable will not be trivial because there has been a lot of changes to onebox gem since last stable release and the core source code (in stable) may not be updated to accommodate the latest gem version.
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I totally understand, that might indeed be pretty complex.
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