Unfurl - domain exceptions (blacklist)

cwe

Well-known member
I enjoy the XF unfurl feature for the most part. External links usually look nice in posts when it works. External links look fine (raw URL) when it doesn't.

However, there is one domain that vexes me terribly - msn.com. All links to news items on msn.com "unfurl" to a simple link with "MSN" as the anchor text. Those links look horrible in the forum and are less informative than having the actual URL displayed.

I would absolutely love it if the XF ACP allowed us to define a list of domains that should be ignored by the unfurl feature so I could add msn.com to the list and never have to manually edit another post (to set unfurl="false" for msn.com links).
 
Upvote 14
testing as i've never seen this:


Yup, looks bad :D

Seems to be that the body is all js-driven from react or angular/next/whateverjs so there's not actually any content available to the ping to get the data.

perhaps the unfurl script could account for this somehow instead of a manual blacklist (although, that could be a nice to have for other use cases)
 
As a workaround you can abuse the "BB Code Media Sites" feature. So on one of my sites ebay have decided we're a bot (which of course we are I guess!) and we get their lovely "Pardon our interruption..." error rather than the nice little preview of the auction. Not very useful.

So until it's sorted properly I've added a new "BB Code Media Site" for ebay where I'm matching the the ebay URL, eg https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/{$id} and an embed template that is simply a hyperlink: <a href="https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/{$id}">https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/{$id}</a>.

That gets matched ahead of any unfurling so any ebay links are just shown as hyperlinks, which is better than the obtuse ebay error message ebay returns. You might find you can do similar with the few sites that are causing you problems.
 
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