Open Graph support to facilitate previews of SA content on social media

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Robert Barrow
  • updated
  • Completed

Sharing on some social media platforms is less than pretty at the moment.

I notice that you don't appear to support Open Graph tags to facilitate nice looking previews.  Even Facebook must be using a workaround to reverse engineer things.

Do you have plans to support Open Graph tags?

How would you rate the customer service you received?

Satisfaction mark by Robert Barrow 5 years ago

My question wasn't fully answered - I did not get an answer to the following question:Can you please check that the User Agent that includes the text: "Discourse Forum Onebox" is allowed and not rate limited in a crippling way when checking for tags.  Is it possible to whiltelist it?  I'm not certain this is the issue but it does seem suspicious.

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SA Admin Daniel Hochman
  • Under review
Hi,

Our articles and news pages use OpenGraph. If you see it not working, please send us an example.

Thanks,
Daniel
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Robert Barrow

Daniel, thanks for you response!

Can you check that the User Agent that includes the text: "Discourse Forum Onebox" is allowed and not rate limited in a crippling way?

(Please refer to this post on Discourse meta: https://meta.discourse.org/t/onebox-user-agent/61498/18)

I'm getting strange inconsistent results using Onebox (https://github.com/discourse/onebox)

Full disclosure:  I'm building a forum for a target set of users who are used to sharing (amongst others) seekingalpha articles.

The forum is based on the extremely popular Discourse engine (https://www.discourse.org/)

I'm finding the oneboxing a bit unreliable and inconsistent with seekingalpha content.  Sometimes I get a title and a successful onebox including a thumbnail.  For some articles no compatible tags seemed to have been returned and I'm getting no oneboxing.

Here's an example of a successful one, great!:



Note how the Discourse Topic title reflects the previewed content (this is automatically filled in).


Here are unsuccessful ones:

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3401631-trump-mulling-tieing-u-s-drug-prices-europes

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3415167-ibm-sell-select-software-products-hcl-technologies-1_8b

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4226877-microns-guidance-implications

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4223492-blackstone-blue-chip-private-equity-name-continues-reward-investors-plus-7_7-percent-yield

None of these appear to return a title either.

I note one of these is subscribers only, but they should at least one-box successfully from a marketing perspective? 




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SA Admin Daniel Hochman
  • Completed

Hi,

Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be able to tweak our metadata to suit every platform. We are compatible with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.. 

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Robert Barrow

I'm not convinced that's the issue and wouldn't expect that.

If you are conforming to OpenGraph it should be fine, right?  Then onus is on the consumer.

As requested, are you able to check that the User Agent that includes the text: "Discourse Forum Onebox" is allowed and not rate limited in a crippling way?  In other words, has the same privileges to access the tags like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Something strange is happening because if I go to

https://opengraphcheck.com/

Are you allowing their user agent?

This is important ... we would want to secure the open web and not prioritise only the biggest players, right?

Discourse is however hugely popular and getting bigger by the day.

If I can't share your content, all Discourse instances may be similarly affected ... that's a lot of forums!