TASVideos
Idea: Include page content in our embeds (Open Graph Meta Tags)
This is an idea, and rather than immediately implementing it, I wanted this ticket to disuss options. Embeds of links to our site are controlled by og tags, and currently our embeds look like this:
Current embeds
My idea was to actually include the first interesting parts of the Post/Topic/Wiki Page into the description field of the embed. Additionally one idea is to take the first image of the content as the display image (it seems many pages do this).
A result might look like this (before | after):
Ignoring Publications and Submissions for now, because their embeds have a different layout, and are easily recognizable as that.
Discussion
It is difficult to properly include every information that might be important. For example the author of Wiki Pages and Topics is not that important, but for Posts including the author is essential.
I've thought about what I want to include as necessary into embeds, and this is what I came up with:
Forum or Wiki Page
There needs to be a way to tell whether you're going to click on something of the forum, or on something on the wiki (the rare System pages should have automatic or easy recognition). The reason why this is necessary can be seen with these two pages: https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/21178 and https://tasvideos.org/Bizhawk/GB .
The first one is Forum → Bizhawk → Gameboy BIOS, a question about BG bios, the second is Wiki → BizHawk/GB, the official wiki page about the bizhawk GB core.
Taking away the information about Forum or Wiki would result in confusion about the page you're about to land on.
Location
"Location" is what I call the LuaScripting part of the LuaScripting/Display page, or the Site of a Site → Question. topic or a post in there. The location seems less important, and yet I don't think embeds are useful without them.
Topic Title
This one is obvious, forum topics have titles, and those have to make it into the embeds, ideally into the title. Currently topic titles are in the description, because Posts don't have titles, so "Topic by user" works next to "Post by user".
Post Author
As mentioned before, the author of a post is important when linking the post. Especially if we want to include post content into the description.
Now there are other elements that would be nice, but are not necessary:
- Page content: Of course, this is the entire point of this issue. I think it would make it easier to know what the link is about. (It would maybe allow enabling embeds in our updates channel again, I'd enjoy seeing a snippet of a post before clicking into it.)
- Timestamp: The date it was created. This is less important for Wiki pages, but useful for topics and posts. It already exists in Submissions and Publications because I thought it would be essential there. However, I doubt there is enough space to include the timestamp in other embeds.
Discord currently shows 70 characters of the title, and 350 characters of the description.
I am planning to think of a layout that makes sense here, just to somehow include the page content into the embed, however, this might end up worse than before.
@nattthebear Would it be possible in theory to make the Wiki/Forum parser return a text form of the markup, for a snippet description? (I suppose it's, similar to how the youtube descriptions work, maybe? Does the parser do that?) But it's important that stuff like a [quote] at the beginning is skipped, maybe all of them...
The wiki parser has something useful already in the form of WriteTextAsync which is currently mostly used for Youtube, but should be adaptable.
There's nothing like this in the forum parser, but it could be easily added as another form of output.
Whatever ends up being implemented could also be used for the email notifications
