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BBCode tags showing in social media posts

Started by njtweb, July 12, 2018, 12:51:36 PM

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njtweb

This is interesting, bbcode tags are showing up on FB and G+ posts when posting a topic to social media. Any reason why this would happen? If an image is embedded using the image tags the tags show wrapped around the link for the image, instead of the image showing. Same deal with anything wrapped in bbcode tags.

Kindred

because the content of the message has the BBCode....      the BBCode is parsed on DISPLAY through the forum. I'm not sure if RSS feeds parse BBC before being displayed, but I don't think they do... and the content shared to FB, etc just reads the code of the page - so it is definitely NOT parsed


(and no, there is no good way to "fix" this in the current codebase)
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njtweb

Quote from: Kindred on July 12, 2018, 01:41:55 PM
because the content of the message has the BBCode....      the BBCode is parsed on DISPLAY through the forum. I'm not sure if RSS feeds parse BBC before being displayed, but I don't think they do... and the content shared to FB, etc just reads the code of the page - so it is definitely NOT parsed


(and no, there is no good way to "fix" this in the current codebase)

Hi Kindred, thank you for the info. To answer your question if the same thing happens with RSS, it's yes, it does it with RSS feeds automatically posting and if you choose the post to social media icons or manually post to social media copying the link.

Kindred

right...   which proved my point.

The only way to avoid this would be to convert the BBC to actual code on submit instead of on display
(which would require a significant change in the way SMF parses submits)
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

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njtweb

Quote from: Kindred on July 12, 2018, 02:11:20 PM
right...   which proved my point.

The only way to avoid this would be to convert the BBC to actual code on submit instead of on display
(which would require a significant change in the way SMF parses submits)

Ok, at least I know it's not just me. Do you think it's possible for a mod to be made for this type of conversion?

Arantor

RSS, I get, but why would the other methods show bbc? Putting in the link to Facebook and getting bbc implies it's getting it from somewhere other than the content itself...

Kindred


Good catch. My initial guess was wrong. (well, wrong but right at the same time, I bet)

Because, I am betting that njtwebis using a mod which generates the social media readable description/content -- and that mod just pulls from the database, not from the content.
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

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njtweb

Quote from: Arantor on July 12, 2018, 02:19:48 PM
RSS, I get, but why would the other methods show bbc? Putting in the link to Facebook and getting bbc implies it's getting it from somewhere other than the content itself...

I'm using Dlvrit for rss posting SMF topics from my forum. If I copy the URL and paste it to social media it does the same thing.

1.   Post and PM Inline Attachments   6.13   
2.   Simple Audio Video Embedder   4.5   
3.   Embedded Poll Viewer BBC   1.0   
4.   TinyPortal   1.5.0   
5.   Personalized BBC   1.92   
6.   Responsive Curve   1.0.0   
7.   SMF Post Prefix   2.0.3   
8.   SMF Trader System   1.7   
9.   SMF Classifieds   4.0.13   
10.   ENotify   3.0   
11.   AdSense Mod   1.0   
12.   Yarex 2 smiley set   2.0.0.1   
13.   SMF 2.0.15 Update   1.0   
14.   PDF Tag   1.2   
15.   Advanced Recent Posts   1.1.1   
16.   reCAPTCHA for SMF   1.0.0   
17.   Drop Guest Email Requirement In Posting   1.0.1   
18.   Recent Topics On Board Index   1.03   
19.   Board Icons   1.0   
20.   Optimus   1.9.7.3   
21.   404 on Missing Topics/Boards   2.1   
22.   Hide ip stuff for users   1.05   
23.   Share This Topic   4.1.2   
24.   Add Facebook Like, Tweet, and Google +1   1.0.3a   
25.   External and NoFollow All Links   1.0.0   
26.   More Spiders   1.2   
27.   SMF Likes Plus   1.5   
28.   Tidy Child Boards   2.0   
29.   Linked Words   1.0   
30.   Yet Another Global Announcements Mod   2.7.5   
31.   Reply Button In Every Post   1.0   
32.   Separate Replies and Views Column   1.9.2   
33.   Effectively Remove SMF Logo   2.0

Illori


njtweb

Any post with bbcode in it, but here's one https://www.youthhockeyinfo.com/index.php/topic,319.0.html

The images won't show up, you'll see the img tags with the url between them.

Kindred

Well, why do you have those stupid .html urls?

this seems to work just fine
https://test.turtleshellprod.com/index.php?topic=64.0


but that is correct, it will not parse images IN the text.  Facebook never does that. It selects/generates ONE image (if any)
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Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

njtweb

Quote from: Kindred on July 12, 2018, 02:41:56 PM
Well, why do you have those stupid .html urls?

this seems to work just fine
https://test.turtleshellprod.com/index.php?topic=64.0


but that is correct, it will not parse images IN the text.  Facebook never does that. It selects/generates ONE image (if any)

When I installed SMF and went through the theme config, I clicked "Search Engine Friendly URLS". If I turn that off will it screw up all of my established URLS in google search?

Kindred

it may.... but that setting is a holdover form 10 years ago when search engines did not like ?action= in the URL. Now a days, they don't care...   and those urls look terrible, IMO. They are not normal URLs and yet are not actually "friendly" URLs either.

If your only issue is the IMG tag, then there is nothing to be done.
If you were having issues with other BBC tags (like it shows the [b]...[/b]) then there would be something else wonky
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Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

GigaWatt

Quote from: njtweb on July 12, 2018, 02:38:39 PM
The images won't show up, you'll see the img tags with the url between them.

Is this what I'm supposed to see?

"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

"A 500 error loosely translates to the webserver saying, "WTF?"..."

njtweb

Yes, if you go to the actual website page you'll see all of that. On the FB or G+ post it wouldn't be all of that because it truncates at a certain number of characters, but the img tags show with a URL for the image, not the actual image when posted on social media.

njtweb

Quote from: Kindred on July 12, 2018, 03:24:45 PM
it may.... but that setting is a holdover form 10 years ago when search engines did not like ?action= in the URL. Now a days, they don't care...   and those urls look terrible, IMO. They are not normal URLs and yet are not actually "friendly" URLs either.

If your only issue is the IMG tag, then there is nothing to be done.
If you were having issues with other BBC tags (like it shows the [b]...[/b]) then there would be something else wonky

It's not just image tags. It's any tag I use, bold text, URL tags, colors, lists.....any bbcode tag.

Arantor

Well, you're using Dlvr.it - which means it's going to use RSS to get things.

If you subsequently post the same link to Facebook, it's going to reuse the description it already had from Dlvrit because the URL is the same and FB aggressively caches that stuff...

njtweb

It looks like after I turn off search engine friendly urls links still work if they're listed as .html. This entire tinyportal article page is all .html urls and when I click them it still takes you to the correct forum but it appends .html to it.

Can you click a few and see if they work for you?

https://www.youthhockeyinfo.com/index.php?page=rink-directory

njtweb

I'm not asking anybody to do anything but click 2 or 3 links to let me know if the links still work for them too. I'd like to confirm after I emptied cache and tested in my own browsers that they're also working. I turned off the theme "search engine friendly URL's" function. All of the SMF links are back to normal now, the links on the rink directory are still .html

Thank you for whoever is kind enough to confirm they still work for me.

SychO

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