From looking at the URLs, I don’t see any functional difference between these two links (other than one of them going to a good movie and the other not). But the first is a boring text box that feels the need to point out that amazon.com is a limited liability company, and the second has a cool picture of the DVD cover!
LINK ONE:
LINK TWO:
Can you guys see how I could make the former a non-boring link? Is this a Discourse thing that maybe @wumpus or @Clay might know? Or is it an Amazon thing out of our hands?
I notice that LINK ONE shows in my browser as fully secure, while LINK TWO displays a warning that the connection isn’t fully secure, and attackers could replace the images before they get to me.
So my guess would be something to do with https support and whether Discourse is able to retrieve images from protected pages.
Christine actually does better with web standard meta tags for previewing links. BUT, if Discourse just followed those, the Ishtar preview would be shitsville. So, basically, Discourse probably needs to be changed to treat Amazon links (and other special cases) to first check for those tags, and when they are not found, then use the extra-special sauce for dealing with sites that usually have issues, like Amazon. I’m guessing at the moment it just uses the extra special code which is failing on the video page for Christine which looks different than the usual Amazon product page.
But, hey, what do I know? I’m just guessing here. :)
@wumpus, has this not been an issue at other places that use Discourse? It’s no big deal, but I wasn’t sure if it was something Amazon was doing, something Discourse was doing, or something I was doing.
Ah, I didn’t realize the unifying factor was that they were all links to streaming video. That’s what makes it boring. If I link to the DVD, it’s fine:
It’s just the VOD version that makes it boring.
Thanks, @wumpus. Good to know for future reference. I just figured more people would be interested in watching it online than buying physical media.
