Embedded Thumbnails Missing

[Zankza]

I've spent last forty minutes trying to get my mind around this erratic behavior XF 2 has. It is also my first time to play around with XF:MG, so bear with me.

It seems that the thumbnails for embedded media just simply decides to construct a thumbnail or not, there is no exact pattern or reason just yet.

At Add media page, when you try to insert a direct image from IMGUR, for instance a example,

https://i.imgur.com/rzocQcD

as the content

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As you can notice the embed is missing metadata (and no thumbnail generated) if I try to go ahead fill out a dummy metadata

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The picture does get displayed, but it's thumbnail fails, in contrast if I choose different URL scheme (from same picture and same entity from imgur) this time as "gallery" URL which looks like this:

https://imgur.com/gallery/Isq3n

https://i.imgur.com/OPSy3dy.png
https://i.imgur.com/Ns0xAOK.png

So the gallery links are working, on other hand, if I try a youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFfYV3mXa9o

https://i.imgur.com/X9kDOlU.png
https://i.imgur.com/43dnXXB.png
https://i.imgur.com/Ltbp9qt.png

As you can see, the thumbnails are broken, so it's not just IMGUR or YT, but something else appears to be broken, because "some parts" of IMGUR appears to work, but sometime it doesn't. I do not use upload functions, my media are never uploaded, they are always sourced by IMGUR and YT as you can see thumbnails are quite important as well automatically importing metadata.

Thanks for any help in advance.

 

[Zankza]

@Chris_D is this topic supposed to be filed into a bug instead of support question?

 

[Chris D]

Seems to be working ok here:

https://xenforo.com/community/media/a-fiancé’s-christmas-present-to-her-husband.2097/

We take a fairly simple screen scraping approach to retrieving things like the thumbnail and title. If this is only working sporadically then it would indicate that your server is having difficulty in making the necessary HTTP requests to retrieve the info.

 

[Zankza]

The behavior is actually consistent now, it always works when I use a gallery link.

Is there some kind of tool or some log I can tail onto?

 

[Chris D]

Not really. It should just work. Your server is most likely using cURL to perform the HTTP request. I'm not sure if it's possible to enable any sort of verbose logging for that.

The only significant difference between this and any other link:

https://i.imgur.com/rzocQcD

Is that this performs a redirect to:

https://imgur.com/rzocQcD

We handle redirects though, and as you can see it should work (I used the i.imgur.com link here).

If cURL is involved then it might be worth looking to see if any upgrades to cURL are available and whether they solve the issue. Your host might have more advice in terms of troubleshooting any connectivity problems in terms of HTTP requests between your server and a remove server.

 

[Zankza]

OK, and for control purpose, what do you have to say about the youtube link? As I understand YT link isn't even a redirection like IMGUR.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/y2k13j13sp2cubc/2017-12-27_14-13-44.mp4
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/4innpk0kxidxe6c/2017-12-27_14-15-07.mp4

Would this behavior also identify some problem of outgoing? I maintain the host myself, it doesn't seem to me like that. metadata is resolved nearly instantaneous.

 

[Zankza]

cURL is at latest stable release,

Here's a verbose from cURL which appears to be working without hitch.

https://pastebin.com/exa77PQU

 

[Zankza]

Other thing is that, as I understand the code/system relies on the "BBcode media sites", if I try to embed the youtube video, it does things just fine.

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[Chris D]

XFMG does use the BB code media site system but the unique thing it does is perform a HTTP request to fetch a thumbnail and title and description.

I don’t really have any further suggestions but as we’ve had no other reports of this and the system seems to be generally working fine, it really just points to some internal issue with your server making those requests.

Sorry I can’t be more help.

 

[Zankza]

You want to keep blaming the host, I use OVH and I've even gathered the raw data.

https://pastebin.com/w1kv026A
https://pastebin.com/kYw9yn05

https://pastebin.com/wcAKLCPZ
https://pastebin.com/eqyLzKQ5

Those are the headers and body responses respectively, which was recorded on the same server that's hosting the board and having problems with embedded functions.

I do not think this is an network or hardware, rather something is misbehaving inside xenforo.

 

[Chris D]

I’m not particularly looking to blame any thing, but here’s really not a lot to go wrong here.

If you’d like to submit a ticket and provide FTP and forum log in details then I’ll see if I can add some logging code to trap the actual underlying error.