Posting of weblinks, auto-fetch of remote page's title and abstrac

[Brain Sparks]

On Facebook.com, when using the messaging feature, if you write a message that includes a weblink, the system goes off and fetches the title of that target webpage, together with an abstract of the page and a thumbnail.

Would be cool if IPB could have the same feature. Make the settings customisable by admin, of course.

On my forum, for example, users are forever posting something like:

Check out this news!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7182436.stm

It would be great if the forum would automatically change this to:

Check out this news!

Blair optimism on Mid-East peace

The IPB post page would need a bit of AJAX that detects when someone writes a URL, it then goes off and fetches the page at that URL, extracts the HTML "title" tag, and creates an abstract from the page content.

[bfarber]

The thumbnail part isn't possible without special server-side software (so you'd need a dedicated server to be able to install software to it, or use a service somewhere on the internet). The abstract part is tricky....it's hard to know where in the page to grab the text from. Title isn't so hard, though there are servers without allow_url_fopen on, someone could link to a nonexistent site or a site that's down (so the page title can't be fetched, and it would take a lot longer to post the topic since you'd have to wait for the page title request to timeout) and so on. There's a lot of potential complications you have to take into account for something like this..

[henke37]

Like the good old url based attack redirection. Someone gets something else (like googlebot) to visit an url that will lead to an attack on some site.