XF 1.5 Embedding Links.

[Okenyon]

Hey guys, I've forgotten how to change what happens when links are posted in posts.

For example that the URL displays the full meta tags, full thread name etc.

 

[Paul B]

The only built in option is to pull the title - that can be enabled in the ACP.

 

[Okenyon]

Ok great, thank you where is this option please?

 

[Paul B]

Use the ACP search and enter: convert urls

 

[Okenyon]

Mine are turned on, however they don't convert the title, they JUST show the site meta tags and not the thread title after?

 

[Mike]

What do you mean the meta tags? We only ever pull what is identified as the title of the page, though this does come from meta tags in some cases. Can you show an example?

 

[Okenyon]

When I post a link now, it no longer says the thread title, for example it used to say:

SITE META TITLE | THREAD TITLE

now it just says SITE META TITLE

As you can see from the above it's switched on to include titles but it doesn't.

 

[Mike]

To follow up, we pull from the og:title tag if present (which is one of the meta tags I mentioned) as this is designated to be the title of the item. It looks like that is just including the site title on every page rather than a unique value. You'll see effectively the same behavior in other tools that use the og:title (Facebook for one).

 

[Okenyon]

Fixed this, thank you.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

My question is the same as this but simpler maybe. When I post a link to another thread in my forum. It posts the full link. I was looking for the behavior to replace the THREAD BBcode from vBulletin and thought the auto replacement of URL's would be the technique.
In the ACP option, Convert URLs to Page Titles it says if the conversion string is left blank the title will be used. When I paste a URL it still gives the full URL.
Could I get a pointer to where this is explained more fully?

 

[Mike]

It will try to connect to the server and pull the <title> tag (or similar). Does it work if you put a link to a thread here for example? If so, then that may indicate that your web server is having problems connecting back to itself in a way where it can load a page like a "normal" user. There are some /etc/hosts configurations that can cause this, for example.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

Yes, if I post a reference to this thread on my new board it shows up correctly. Just for fun, here is a reference to a thread on my new board posted here. http://xf.nawcc.org/index.php?threads/best-damaskeening-pattern.141402/ Can I poke this again?

I guess this is more subtle than I thought. Is it actually requesting the title from the URL that appears next to the favicon up in the header of my browser?

Follow up...

I tried the tool at buzzstream to read the title of the url above and it fetched it just fine.

Can someone tell me where to look for the configuration issue? this is a standard cPanel installation that we built to hold XenForo.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

This is the content of the /etc/hosts file

127.0.0.1    localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1              localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6
10.200.200.46 mb2.nawcc.org mb2

 

[Mike]

We don't have an explicit debugging tool here, but if you ping xf.nawcc.org from your server, does it resolve to the "correct" IP or 127.0.0.1/::1? If the latter, that probably means that the connection isn't being handled by your web server as expected and thus isn't returning the normal page.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

Thanks for the tip. It is probably worse than you suspected. The server is on a lan that resolves connections between all the servers at the facility and there is a NAT gateway that resolves the external ip addresses. Usually it seem transparent.

Here is what ping returns:

 ping xf.nawcc.org
PING xf.nawcc.org (50.244.233.125) 56(84) bytes of data.
From gateway (10.200.200.175): icmp_seq=3 Redirect Network(New nexthop: 10.200.200.1 (10.200.200.1))
From gateway (10.200.200.175) icmp_seq=3 Redirect Network(New nexthop: 10.200.200.1 (10.200.200.1))
[/quote]
At that point it is dead until I hit ctrl/c.
I am using putty to get to the server console.

 

[Mike]

That's not actually a ping response I've seen before, but it looks like it's going to end up forwarding the request to 10.200.200.1, so that seems to fit. You would likely need to either make your web server listen on that network adapter (if it isn't already) or make your virtual host within the web server attach to that IP.

If you want to do a test, you could try wget/curl'ing from the command line to xf.nawcc.org to see whether an XF page is returned. If not, that will be the problem.

 

[Tom McIntyre]

Thanks for the tip. I will check it tomorrow.

One thing that surprised me was that the buzzfeed tool http://tools.buzzstream.com/meta-tag-extractor handles all the addresses and returns their title tag (and other stuff). Perhaps they are reading the full source.