Website Links pasted into a Topic

[ideas]

Website Links are automatically expanded to provide additional context and information. What meta data is discourse reading and how is it formatted (e.g. Facebook’s Open Graph).

[JammyDodger]

Is this any help?

Create rich link previews with Onebox

Onebox converts your web links into useful preview excerpts that help inform readers about the target before they click through. To create a onebox, simply paste any link into a post on a line by itself, like so: https://example.com/interesting-article Which results in … In addition to supporting general oEmbed and OpenGraph tags, Onebox has many custom rules for extremely popular sites including Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon, Youtube, Soundcloud, Stack Overflow, Github and more. Try it o…

[ideas]

Hello Jammy

It has to work automatically for the Forum Users. However, oEmbed might be the clue I need, perhaps that is what Discourse scrapes.

[ideas]

… or you mean OneBox is what provides Discourse with the capability? I currently do not have a forum on my website but I want my website links to be expanded by the Discourse Forums I belong to.

For example the MIT App Inventor Forum uses Discourse and does expand some website links, but not mine. I have Open Graph property tags and my links are expanded by WhatsApp and LinkedIn, but not by Discourse, hence my Topic.

[JammyDodger]

I’m afraid I don’t have in-depth knowledge of the inner workings, but the guide above has some tips on what information Discourse needs to be able to Onebox:

@sam

Once you’ve pasted the link, behind the scenes, onebox visits the destination page and checks for Open Graph or oEmbed tags, including:

• site address
• title
• feature image
• description (mandatory)
• product price

Please note that Discourse does require the description tag to be present and contain enough text to summarize the page, or the target link will not onebox.

And a couple of troubleshooting tips too:

@sam

Troubleshooting

If Onebox is not working as expected, please check the following:

• Test your site by pasting the link into iFramely ; check that the target is using correct OpenGraph or oEmbed meta tags for content. And remember the description text is required in Discourse!
• Verify that the onebox request to the target website has not been blocked by user-agent . Some WordPress hosts frequently block “unknown” user agents.

How do they stack up compared to your existing metadata?

[ideas]

Actually, sounds like my existing Open Graph tags should work with Discourse. Lets see what iFramely thinks…

Well, works perfectly on iFramely, including the mobile representation.

For some reason I cannot fathom, it is now working on Discourse (tested on the MIT Forum). The arrangement of the data is different to other platforms, including the iFramely test, but at least it works.

Your help very much appreciated JammyDodger, thank you.