XF 1.2 Embedded media in RSS feeds

[HittingSmoke]

There's a few threads about this, but the only one with any real discussion of solutions is from 2011.

I have some feeds posting to a forum that regularly have embedded Youtube videos. They don't parse in the RSS reader XenForo uses. I understand why converting embedded Youtube videos into BBCode would be a nightmare. I have a few questions that I hope will lead up to a solution.

Why does the RSS feed have to convert to BBCode? Why can't it just output plain HTML posts so any embedded content remains in tact? Is this a technical limitation of XenForo or a misguided attempt at security precautions to protect users who don't vet content they let on their forums?

Can the embedded content be converted to MediaRSS format? That is, displaying a large thumbnail of the video with metadata which links to the video's Youtube page when clicked. XenForo feeds support this behavior as you can see by calling a direct Youtube feed from the API with a link like http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/RobertsSpaceInd/uploads?alt=rss

Given the prevalence of Youtube videos in RSS feeds I think that even if it's a decent amount of work to pull off, functionality that detects <iframe> tags with a youtube link contained within and converts them to MEDIA tags would be very much worth the work, even if it's just to display the thumbnail and link as is served by the Youtube API.

I'm posting this here instead of the suggestion forums because I don't know if there's a solution that I've not found. If there's a way to get Youtube videos to show up in RSS feeds in XenForo even if it's just a thumbnail link, please let me know.

 

[Adam Howard]

XenForo shies away from using html in forum post for security reasons. If I could impute any random html into your site, I could seriously cause you some harm (this is is true for any forum software, not just XenForo).

 

[HittingSmoke]

XenForo shies away from using html in forum post for security reasons. If I could impute any random html into your site, I could seriously cause you some harm (this is is true for any forum software, not just XenForo).

But it's not like users can arbitrarily add RSS feeds to your forum. That's an admin decision and if an admin doesn't trust the source of their RSS feed, they shouldn't be adding the RSS feed in the first place. I can also misconfigure my web server and expose config.php to downloading, exposing my plain-text database password to the world. I could also allow PHP execution in my uploads folder by poor configuration of my web server. Does that mean XenForo shouldn't support file uploads? Restricting useful functionality because some people screw up is a road we can go down until we're stuck with no more functionality than a static site generator.