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Feature Request - Better link formatting


Michael R

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Posted

When posting links from web sources is it possible to pull and format additional information from the source?

We post a lot of news articles on our site. Rather than just pasting the link, I would like it to pull in linked image and an excerpt of the text like what happens on FB and G+.

I would be more than willing to pay for this functionality as an application.

 

post4.png

Posted
6 minutes ago, CheersnGears said:

That's an internal link, no need to spider and scrape anything. 

How about this then? The video is retrieved by AJAX feeding back to the server, server then retrieves content and the browser then displays the response (the preview)

 

Posted
2 minutes ago, Kirill N said:

Please no. 

Although it would be nice if the system could replace the link text with the page title.

for example, if I paste http://community.invisionpower.com, the link would be shown as IPS Community Suite - Forums

Why would this be a bad thing? Most social sites do this now.

On my site we post a lot of news articles for discussion. I would much rather post a link and have it excerpt some content and let the user reply to the post rather than click on a link and not come back.

I am not necessarily suggesting it becomes part of the core application, but I would be willing to pay $30-$40 (possibly even more) for an application that enables this.

Posted
7 minutes ago, Michael R said:

Why would this be a bad thing? Most social sites do this now.

It's a little bit different because when you share a link to Twitter and Facebook it becomes the only thing in the post and the center of it (meaning that you can't add a photo or a video if you already added a link). That's why a preview makes sense there. In forum posts, links are only a small part of the post most of the time and a preview could look out of place and be unwanted.

In other words, when you post a link to Facebook, you are asking people to check it out, that's why it's nice to give them a preview. In forum posts, links are used as reference most of the time that's why a preview is unnecessary.

 

Posted
6 minutes ago, Kirill N said:

It's a little bit different because when you share a link to Twitter and Facebook it becomes the only thing in the post and the center of it (meaning that you can't add a photo or a video if you already added a link). That's why a preview makes sense there. In forum posts, links are only a small part of the post most of the time and a preview could look out of place and be unwanted.

In other words, when you post a link to Facebook, you are asking people to check it out, that's why it's nice to give them a preview. In forum posts, links are used as reference most of the time that's why a preview is unnecessary.

 

That's what I want to do.

Post a link to a news article like this: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/maureen-ohara-spirited-movie-star-dies-95-34703112

and get something like this:

Maureen O'Hara, Spirited Movie Star, Dies at 95
By robert jablon, associated press
LOS ANGELES — Oct 24, 2015, 3:46 PM ET

GTY_how_green_was_my_valley_jt_151024_12

Fiery-haired and feisty, Maureen O'Hara could handle anything the world and Hollywood threw at her. Director John Ford punched her in the jaw at a party and John Wayne dragged her through sheep dung — real sheep dung — in "The Quiet Man." In "Miracle on 34th Street" she learned to believe in Santa Claus.

But first and foremost, she always believed in herself.

"I do like to get my own way," she said in a 1991 interview with The Associated Press. "There have been crushing disappointments. But when that happens...

SOURCE: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/maureen-ohara-spirited-movie-star-dies-95-34703112

 

Posted
4 minutes ago, Michael R said:

That's what I want to do.

Post a link to a news article like this: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/maureen-ohara-spirited-movie-star-dies-95-34703112

and get something like this:

Maureen O'Hara, Spirited Movie Star, Dies at 95
By robert jablon, associated press
LOS ANGELES — Oct 24, 2015, 3:46 PM ET

GTY_how_green_was_my_valley_jt_151024_12

Fiery-haired and feisty, Maureen O'Hara could handle anything the world and Hollywood threw at her. Director John Ford punched her in the jaw at a party and John Wayne dragged her through sheep dung — real sheep dung — in "The Quiet Man." In "Miracle on 34th Street" she learned to believe in Santa Claus.

But first and foremost, she always believed in herself.

"I do like to get my own way," she said in a 1991 interview with The Associated Press. "There have been crushing disappointments. But when that happens...

SOURCE: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/maureen-ohara-spirited-movie-star-dies-95-34703112

 

That's too much.

Posted

Too much because?

On my site (and others I have moderated) we have whole forums dedicated to news articles. We have specific news moderators that find, format, and post articles just like that. It generates a lot of discussion.

Conversely, members will post a single link in the news forum and very rarely do members reply to those posts.

The idea is to engage your audience. Pull them in. Make it as easy as possible for them to participate in discussion.

Posted

As IPS or someone else would have to add supports for every different sites. I don't think there will be one rule that it works for any sites.

However, this is something like oembed, perhaps you could check if mymerrychristams.com or abcnews.go.com supports oembed...

Posted
1 minute ago, icedream said:

As IPS or someone else would have to add supports for every different sites. I don't think there will be one rule that it works for any sites.

However, this is something like oembed, perhaps you could check if mymerrychristams.com or abcnews.go.com supports oembed...

MMC uses WordPress for the front end newspages and XenForo for discussion forums. He moved from vB. I tried talking him into IPS. :)

 

  • 4 months later...
Posted

shark-tank.jpg I don't support this.

My members post lots of links (a lot of links) and I think, while it may work for your community, it won't work for most communities. It's not that I think that it is a bad idea but I don't think that it would work for any of the sites I run or support. I also don't think it will scale well.

For those reasons I'm out.

 

Posted

To me that style of link-and-quote is an editorial matter and not a technical one.

I like the style personally, but if automated it would create an entire new class of workarounds and feature requests to undo it, format it differently, option-ize it, etc.

Posted
On 10/30/2015 at 7:04 AM, Michael R said:

Why would this be a bad thing? Most social sites do this now.

 

Oxwall, (free software) does this out of the box.

Posted
On 30. Oktober 2015 at 2:17 PM, Michael R said:

Is it much different than when posting links like this?

Yes.

On 30. Oktober 2015 at 2:48 PM, Nathan Explosion said:

How about this then? The video is retrieved by AJAX feeding back to the server, server then retrieves content and the browser then displays the response (the preview)

That’s an API call, not crawling the site for extractable information. 

 

That being said, I can’t really see that as a stock feature for the editor and in turn the forum app. Just the few services (YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram …) currently supported cause so many problems and are tweaked since 4.0 was released. Trying to crawl every link out there and embed something from it in a forum post would cause endless new problems.

I do miss the feature a little bit though for specific link fields, such as the link and YouTube field in Pages. Here it would make more sense. If you have a video database or news database and the linked sites provide an og:image for example, then it feels kind of silly that one has to manually extract that and upload it to the record. 

  • 1 year later...
Posted

And... bumping this because I think it's a nice idea + it's 2017 already and some things changed: Most sites today use OpenGraph tags (for the same reason - so when sharing links from their website on Facebook it will be able to embed correctly).

IPS could very easily use an API service like: http://www.opengraph.io/ in order to get the OpenGraph data of a link, with a small AJAX request.
Not sure about licensing though, they have a free plan up to 100 requests/hour, 5,000 requests/month, but of course each user will have to set up its own account.

$.ajax('http://opengraph.io/api/1.0/site/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtontimes.com%2F')
  .done(function(data){
    console.log(data);
  });

Will return:

{
  "hybridGraph": {
    "title": "Washington Times - Politics, Breaking News, US and World News",
    "description": "The Washington Times delivers breaking news and commentary on the issues that affect the future of our nation.",
    "image": "http://twt-assets.washtimes.com/v4/images/logo-twt.4b20fb5d7b29.svg",
    "url": "http://www.washingtontimes.com/",
    "type": "site",
    "site_name": "Washington Times "
  },
  "openGraph": {...},
  "htmlInferred": {...},
  "requestInfo": {...}
}

source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19312942/how-can-i-retrieve-og-meta-attributes-of-a-resource

http://www.opengraph.io/examples/php-open-graph-example/

http://www.opengraph.io/examples/jquery-opengraph-example/

 

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted
On 7/22/2017 at 7:59 AM, Omri Amos said:

And... bumping this because I think it's a nice idea + it's 2017 already and some things changed: Most sites today use OpenGraph tags (for the same reason - so when sharing links from their website on Facebook it will be able to embed correctly).

IPS could very easily use an API service like: http://www.opengraph.io/ in order to get the OpenGraph data of a link, with a small AJAX request.
Not sure about licensing though, they have a free plan up to 100 requests/hour, 5,000 requests/month, but of course each user will have to set up its own account.


$.ajax('http://opengraph.io/api/1.0/site/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtontimes.com%2F')
  .done(function(data){
    console.log(data);
  });

Will return:


{
  "hybridGraph": {
    "title": "Washington Times - Politics, Breaking News, US and World News",
    "description": "The Washington Times delivers breaking news and commentary on the issues that affect the future of our nation.",
    "image": "http://twt-assets.washtimes.com/v4/images/logo-twt.4b20fb5d7b29.svg",
    "url": "http://www.washingtontimes.com/",
    "type": "site",
    "site_name": "Washington Times "
  },
  "openGraph": {...},
  "htmlInferred": {...},
  "requestInfo": {...}
}

source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19312942/how-can-i-retrieve-og-meta-attributes-of-a-resource

http://www.opengraph.io/examples/php-open-graph-example/

http://www.opengraph.io/examples/jquery-opengraph-example/

 

I would pay extra for this feature.

Posted
21 hours ago, Michael R said:

I would pay extra for this feature.

Me too.

Although I dislike Discourse (ugly in my view), its use of OneBox for embedding links such as the BBC, Wiki, newspapers etc, is very nice. And as mentioned elsewhere here, if forum community managers don't want to use it, let them disable it on a per content type/instance basis.

 

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Btw, if it's of any help I've been testing with iFramely which produces embeds from hundreds of sites.

Then once I have the iFramely embed, I insert it into the editor using the view source button which I enabled in the control panel.

Bit of a fuss, but works, although gets into a muddle if I then try and edit the post later.

If anybody needs a more detailed 'how to', please shout.

Chris

Attached: ABC embed screen grabbed from my test site:

image.thumb.png.3a5ca8c6aa28530797b67f904b01fa72.png

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