Inability to generate link previews, serious bug

Forum
#1

Hi,

Didn’t find where it was previously discussed, but on this forum for some time the Onebox functionality of Discourse no longer works and this means when dropping in a link to some external website we do not get a nice preview generated from OpenGraph metadata on that page.

I recently spun up a Discourse forum myself using Yunohost at https://discuss.coding.social and just now observed that I have the exact same problem.

Nowhere in the logs (at least the ones available in the UI’s) of both Yunohost or Discourse can I find any error relating to this problem. Also, since I installed the forum I haven’t updated anything, and I don’t see anything about an auto-update. And Onebox used to work on the fresh install. It is a mystery why now it doesn’t.

So I expect there’s more nasty deep digging to be done to find and solve this problem, and that likely we face a Yunohost-related issue. Personally I find the generation of those oneboxes very useful and would hate it if I didn’t get it to work. On the whole I am not really satisfied how Yunohost has disabled the native update functionality in Discourse.

I’ll keep you posted if I find anything more related to this problem.

#2

I filed an issue on Github in the Yunohost-Discourse repository:

Onebox link preview generation suddenly stops working #108

#3

I posted to Yunohost forum the suggestion to have the option to leave upgrade to the app (Discourse in our case) if the app has a good upgrade UX from itself. See: Ability to skip Yunohost update process and leave it to the App - Discuss - YunoHost Forum

Update: I also created a feature request on the Issue tracker: https://github.com/YunoHost/issues/issues/2005

#4

I thought there were no error logs, but I was wrong and just updated that to the Github issue: https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/discourse_ynh/issues/108#issuecomment-1100845168

And I just verified that the same error also occurs on this forum.

Update: There is a related issue where fetching images from an external URL to store locally also results in failure. I have updated the Github issue. Testing if the issue also occurs here (this depends on a forum admin setting to cache images locally) → Nope… not witnessed here.