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On my node, posts with an attached link to a WordPress site are not displaying properly: the link preview is entirely absent and just displays as an empty rectangle.

This is a screenshot of this post, as it appears on my node. I see this behavior on both my phone and my desktop:

Has anyone else encountered this? Any ideas on how to solve it?

I'm running Friendica v2021.01 with PHP version 7.3.19-1~deb10u1.

Thanks in advance. ๐Ÿ™‚

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in reply to Spencer

I find a see that happening for a bit, and then my node catches up, finishes fetching the preview, and displays it.

Generally happens when my site is getting the shit kicked out of it (which happens once an hour or so)

in reply to silverwizard

Also I took a liberty to browse through your node public search results (/search?q=%23lego) and it seems that what I said is true for your instance as well - none of Hypolite blog posts generated previews.

So now I am almost certain it is not intermittent issue but configuration issue or persistent bug.

in reply to Spencer

@Spencer I have this too sometimes, not sure why and when. I mean sometimes previews won't load, but I am not sure why.
in reply to Spencer

Some of these previews never load for me. Intermittent loading usually happens with images which get displayed a bit later but previews like this never recover.
in reply to Alexander

@Alexander @Spencer yes, I scrolled through my posts and found one like that from 2 weeks ago. But that was some post created by an RSS feed of a WordPress blog of mine.
Still I see posts from remote contacts like this too.
in reply to utzer [Friendica]

To me it looks like some sort of misconfiguration.

It seems to be depending on the link. If I try to make my own post with this link (blog.mrpetovan.com/review/reviโ€ฆ) I immediately get the same blank result.

If I try different link (say bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canadโ€ฆ) - it works. So it seems it has something to do with the exact link.

in reply to Spencer

Just tried posting another link from the same blog to confirm (blog.mrpetovan.com/review/moviโ€ฆ) - same result, just an empty rectangle.

So it feels like some configuration issue.

in reply to Alexander

@Alexander maybe a configuration error on the Friendica end.

In the source code of the last link there is embedding info included, but that is either invalid or not used.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed" href="https://blog.mrpetovan.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.mrpetovan.com%2Freview%2Fmovie%2Fthe-prom-location-indiana-is-unfortunately-on-point%2F" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml+oembed" href="https://blog.mrpetovan.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.mrpetovan.com%2Freview%2Fmovie%2Fthe-prom-location-indiana-is-unfortunately-on-point%2F&#038;format=xml" />
in reply to utzer [Friendica]

@Alexander the two json/xml files look good and contain the embedding, a picture and some preview text. So probably an issue in Friendica. I wanted to open an issue but did not do it yet.

Feel free to do it.

in reply to utzer [Friendica]

I suspect there could be some hidden setting we just don't know about. If no one here comes up with it I'll open an issue but maybe it works as intended.

Maybe devs know about it? ๐Ÿ˜€

cc: @Michael Vogel and @Hypolite Petovan

in reply to utzer [Friendica]

The question is why some instances work and others don't. E.g. venera.social works.

Maybe there is some setting somewhere?

@Steffen K9 ๐Ÿฐ - it works on libranet, what magic do you have in there? ๐Ÿ˜€

in reply to Alexander

Dunno. I just tried the "indiana" link and got a working link preview with an image. Could it be related to oembed? It's disabled on my nodes - except for Soundcloud, Vimeo etc.
in reply to Steffen K9 ๐Ÿฐ

Looks it has something to do with it! I tried disabling OEmbed and then I was able to post the link with preview while with OEmbed enabled it fails for some reason displaying empty rectangle. Weird.
in reply to utzer [Friendica]

Enable the setting in admin -> site -> policies -> no oembed rich content. Then define the exceptions in the field below.

Btw. that's another example of weird setting names: enable an option to actually disable a function. From my point of view "enable" should always enable something. ๐Ÿ˜€

in reply to utzer [Friendica]

Depends on your taste. ๐Ÿ˜€ I don't like "rich content" stuff - especially the embedded tweets. So I don't allow the rich content in general and only do allow services that don't work w/o it. For example the video/audio player of vimeo and soundcloud only works when embedding of rich content is allowed.
in reply to Steffen K9 ๐Ÿฐ

@Steffen K9 ๐Ÿฐ hmm OK, so what I need to do is allow all pages but not any WordPress as Friendica seems to have problems with embedding from WordPress.

I think we need to file an issue for this, still not a real solution. ๐Ÿ˜’

But thanks for explaining.

in reply to utzer [Friendica]

It still seems broken for me though. I tested it a bit and oembed doesn't work for me with Funkwhale, Soundcloud, YouTube... same empty rectangles.

I even bumped server version to develop - still doesn't work.

I guess something broke after all. But what?

in reply to utzer [Friendica]

No.
If you want oembed ON all the time you need to DISABLE the option completely.
If you want oembed OFF you need to ENABLE te option.
If you want oembed ONLY with some defined domains you need to ENABLE the option plus put a comma separated list of domains in the exceptions field.

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