XF 2.2 What determines whether a link will generate a preview or stay a link?

jayhawku

jayhawku

Member
My forum relies on sharing news and often links to news sites that sometimes generates a preview of the story:

www.newsweek.com

Lloyd Austin leaving Biden in dark over hospitalization raises questions

The president and several other senior government officials were unaware that the secretary of defense had been admitted to hospital.
www.newsweek.com www.newsweek.com

But often, it won't generate a preview like below:


What determines if a preview will generate? I thought perhaps it was a paywall but it's not that.

Thanks!
 
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the problem is that xenforo only fetches a small part of the page content. if the useful content is available in that part of the page, preview would most likely get generated. if not, it wouldn't. cnn, washington post and a lot of other sites have too much irrelevant code at the top of source so they do not get unfurled properly on xenforo.
 
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Paul B said:
The CNN payload is too large.

You can always use the test tool in the ACP to check.

View attachment 296402
Click to expand...
Thank you. The issue for me, rather my users, is in sharing news content they would be like look what happened in Washington today and then simply drop in the link where the preview working correctly shows the headline and story. They don't need to do anymore work.

If the preview doesn't show up, it's just the link and they would have to write out what the story is and a preview themselves. Not knowing whether it makes a preview or not before posting it was the issue.

But, I understand what you're saying and why it happens. Guess if developers are reading this stuff ever it could be more a suggestion.

Thanks for the help!
 
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I've been grappling with this question for some time and it's still puzzling me.
For some background, I have both XenForo and WoltLab software. On my WoltLab forum, when I post a link from a WordPress based tech blog, DCT, that I write for, the preview works great, but if I post a link from my personal blog which is also WordPress based, no preview shows.
WoltLab suggested I take this up with my hosting company, so I did. They suggested that it was a favicon issue and suggested that I generate new favicons, which I did, together with a web app manifest file. I uploaded the generated files as recommended by Realfavicon, and added code to the header, but it's made no difference whatsoever, so I'm none the wiser.
All these links are not heavy and are for short articles. I also post in a XenForo based motorcycle forum and links don't show any previews from the aforementioned sites either.
I had to delete my XenForo install because of abuse but will reinstall it in a subdomain as a temp test bed for issues such as this.
Frankly, I'm still scratching my head over link previews.
 
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jayhawku said:
But often, it won't generate a preview like below:
Click to expand...

At least it showed a URL for you in that example. Sometimes the unfurl feature leads to even worse outcomes:

cwe

Thread 'Unfurl - domain exceptions (blacklist)'

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...
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