Implemented Display post preview instead of thread preview when unfurling post URL

Alpha1

Well-known member
When a link to a post is posted, then it will display with the thread description.

For example this post starts with 'What on earth is URL unfurling?' but the text used is from the first post of the thread:
This can lead to confusion, because the text may well be irrelevant to what the member is trying to point out. It would be much nicer and more accurate to display text from the actual post.
 
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fwiw, I had @ThemeHouse custom dev this for us, but it should be standard.

Link to thread:

Link to a post in same thread:
 
Agreed. This is unexpected behaviour. The URL used contains a direct reference to a specific post and it is that post which should form the preview; not any other.
 
IMHO, this is technically not really possible - at least not for posts outside the board itself:
A post is part of a thread, as such it does not have its own (Open Graph) metaaata which is what is being processed for unfurl.
 
We have some ideas on how to address this in the future but, indeed, for the reasons already mentioned in various places it’s not really possible as it stands.

Unfurling just isn’t that clever. It gets a URL, it goes to that URL, it gets stuff from the head tag of the URL, it returns some stuff and we format that stuff in an unfurl block.

There’s nothing more or less going on than that hence why it’s absolutely not a bug and behaving exactly as it is designed to.

Of course the technical nuance may make it seem unexpected but it’s just the way it works.

You may want to consider modifying the unfurl template and adjusting its output for unfurls for your host name.

For example, it might seem less unexpected at least if you exclude the description from unfurls from your own host so it’s just the title. You could even just change the template so it just returns a basic link.
 
We have some ideas on how to address this in the future but, indeed, for the reasons already mentioned in various places it’s not really possible as it stands.

Unfurling just isn’t that clever. It gets a URL, it goes to that URL, it gets stuff from the head tag of the URL, it returns some stuff and we format that stuff in an unfurl block.

There’s nothing more or less going on than that hence why it’s absolutely not a bug and behaving exactly as it is designed to.

I think you are missing where the "bug" is. As you say, the bug isn't the Unfurling function -- that is working with what it's given. The "bug" (really a missing feature) is that the Xenforo post link doesn't present a better "description" metadata for post links.

As mentioned, we got this working, but it had to be done custom:

Link to Post #1:


Link to Post #2:


It'd just be better if it was built in.

And this doesn't just affect unfurl on Xenforo. It affects all social shares that show previews. Twitter, FB, Slack, iMessages
 
You may want to consider modifying the unfurl template and adjusting its output for unfurls for your host name.

For example, it might seem less unexpected at least if you exclude the description from unfurls from your own host so it’s just the title.
This. People in my forum like to link to other posts a lot, the unfurl is really confusing. There at least should be an option to exclude certain URLs from unfurling.
 
The MacRumors solution is using the excerpt of the internal linked post as meta description and og:description instead of the first post text.
Maybe is already possibile with a template modification?
 
When a link to a post is posted, then it will display with the thread description.

For example this post starts with 'What on earth is URL unfurling?' but the text used is from the first post of the thread:
This can lead to confusion, because the text may well be irrelevant to what the member is trying to point out. It would be much nicer and more accurate to display text from the actual post.
Yes. This annoys me a ton. Maybe it can be resolved? Not sure how they code the unfurling.
 
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