Content cards

010101

I may have posted about this before. But, I think it’s important enough to bring up again. I believe one reason some say “forums are dead” is because of the lack of eye catching, slick features. Flarum is eye catching on its own. But, it still lacks one feature which would catapult it miles higher than any other forum software. Content cards.

Flarum doesn’t need to turn into a social network. It doesn’t need following or friending. But, content cards I feel aren’t necessarily just for social networks. It’s just a very nice way to share a link. When your software is designed for discussion, why not make all/most links turn into visually appealing content cards which could instantly spark more conversation? Yet, most forum software doesn’t do this. Actually most CMS software doesn’t do this either. I find it so odd that this hasn’t become as standard as liking. Or, as standard as sharing an image. Maybe HTML6 or 7 and browsers will team up one day to make this easy and standard? 🤔😁

Why are forum and CMS software afraid of content cards? Maybe because it’s hard to do? I know I don’t know how to implement it. Or, implement it properly I should say. Because I feel like it’s not just about pulling an image and description via Open Graph tags. It should also have some sort of back up option should a site not have those tags. Plus, it should cache/store card content so it’s not being pulled from the website every time.

I know this was attempted four years ago: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/3702-opengraph-content-embedding

But, it looks like it had conflicts. And, did it do anything to prevent the card content from having to be pulled from the linked website every time? Probably not. Although maybe that’s not important? Forums, come to think of it, do a lot of pulling from other websites. Such as when you post an image (without uploading).

So, that’s what I think. I think content cards are what made Facebook explode. That instant and beautiful way to see content about a link you’re sharing... it’s almost a requirement. But again, forum software doesn’t do it. Or, only partially does it. 🤷‍♂️

tolgaaaltas

Yes, please. Flarum need this.

clarkwinkelmann

Good idea. Like other non-essential features, there's very little chance the Flarum team decides to invest their limited development time into it. This will have to be a third-party extension. If it hasn't been done yet, it's probably because no-one has needed it badly enough to invest time or money into developing it.

I have no doubt it can be done with current Flarum extensibility. But on the technical side, it's not an easy extension. You need to crawl other websites, which is best set up with background tasks and queues, and not everyone can set it up on their hosting. You also need ways to handle all that cached data, and maybe a way to perform refreshes (on-demand or with an expiration) if the remote data changes. With anything pulled from an external host, there are also privacy concerns. The more you proxy through the forum, the safest, but also the more logic and resources it requires.

010101

clarkwinkelmann Maybe the caching/storing part isn’t needed. It would be best, but, I don’t think the text formatting library is doing that with its embeds. The OG part isn’t too hard... but yeah, to have caching/storing/scraping for sites without OG tags, that would make it a complex extension.

If it just pulled from OG tags, and then if those don’t exist at least pulled the web page’s title, and displayed that in a nice way (box; maybe with a light background color) that would be a start.

Littlegolden

Does Flarum only support wordpress and twitter content card for now？

tankerkiller125

Littlegolden if you use the fof/formatting with media embed enabled it supports domains listed in the s9e/textformatting library. (Which includes Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and many more.) But it does not support completely random websites.

010101

Actually, I’d be happy with just slightly more visually appealing URLs in posts.

Full content cards with an image might slow things down especially without caching or storing the pulled content card images. Although, I’m on the fence about this because of the fact that people post images all the time in forums which are pulled from other sites.

As a compromise to full content cards, and this is probably easier to implement, how about simply pulling the page’s Title. If someone posts a plain URL, Flarum pulls in that page’s title and puts it in a box at the end of the post. A colored box, like a quote. Like this (but it should be clickable):

https://stackoverflow.com/a/4349078

Part of me thinks, “what’s the point?” And I think the reasons are: 1) It’s neat. 2) It does give the user potentially useful information. Sure it is only the page’s title, but that title could be enough for a user to decide if they will click or not. It’s at least a LITTLE more for the user than just a long ugly URL.

010101

I guess, with a 3rd party service, this is as easy as:

<script async src="//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js" charset="UTF-8"></script>

<a class="embedly-card" href="https://flarum.org"></a>

But, you’d eventually have to pay for the service. I’m not sure at what point Embedly would stop serving the cards if you aren’t paying. Looks like for just $9 a month though you get unlimited cards with their branding removed... that’s not too bad...