Amazon Links not working?

Steve33

Hi!
Why amazon Links are not shown in posts? How can we fix it?

luceos

Steve33 can you provide an example? Is this here on discuss or your own community?

Steve33

luceos own community.

But here the same, it does not show anything
Here a test with this Link https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B09SJWCKL4/:

luceos

Steve33 you are assuming some embedded content will show up? Have you enabled media embed extension and did you confirm it actually supports amazon links?

Steve33

luceos Have you enabled media embed extension and did you confirm it actually supports amazon links?

Hi!
Yes, YouTube is shown in Posts. we use FoF Formatting for this.

it doesn't necessarily have to show a preview either. Of course it would be nice! currently it doesn't show anything for the links and we have to edit a lot of posts.

Subarist

https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B09SJWCKL4/

When you have an embed extension or link preview, it can recognize these links.
However, if it's within FLARUM itself, it seems that it doesn't recognize such links, possibly due to a formatting parsing issue.

luceos

Subarist yes that happens to me as well, but if I disable AdGuard the embed does show. Do you have any ad blocking browser extensions?

Steve33

Subarist When you have an embed extension or link preview, it can recognize these links.

no i don't use this Plugin.

luceos but if I disable AdGuard the embed does show.

Is AdGuard a Flarum extension if, than i don't use it.

luceos Do you have any ad blocking browser extensions?

Who does not? Of course 🙂

Subarist

luceos Yes, after disabling AdBlock on Edge, the link displayed correctly. But interestingly, after turning off AdBlock, the composer became unable to break lines !? 😇

luceos

Steve33 try disabling your ad blocker then (AdGuard is one of these)...

TeamF

we have the same problem. Our moderators edit all the links manually...

Disabling ad block is not an option. Mine runs directly on the router, and telling every user to disable the blocker to read a post makes no sense.

Nowadays everyone uses a blocker, many browsers already have them by default.

luceos

TeamF have you identified why exactly the amazon embed is marked as an ad then?

PS I never said everyone should disable ad blockers, I asked whether that fixes it for you so we can narrow down the cause.

TeamF

luceos oh, I must have misunderstood. I didn't think that the adblocker sees this as advertising. This is not the case for me with other forum software.

clarkwinkelmann

I think this is a well-known effect/"issue":

Amazon links show up as a link: MediaEmbed is not used, this is normal post parsing behaviour

Amazon links show up as embed: MediaEmbed is enabled

Amazon links don't show anything - blank space: MediaEmbed is enabled and your browser's ad blocker prevented the embed from loading.

If you want YouTube embeds but don't care for Amazon embeds, you can use this extension to only enable YouTube (or any selection of supported websites) in MediaEmbed https://discuss.flarum.org/d/31404-selective-mediaembed

As to the why the embed is blocked, I would assume it's not really an advertisement issue, but it's definitely a tracking issue. When the Amazon embed is rendered, Amazon will track that you have seen that product and might then use this to serve you targeted ads, hence why many privacy-focused browser extensions might block it.

The MediaEmbed TextFormatter plugin should definitely be improved in a way where a browser blocking the embed does not result in zero content being displayed, there should be some sort of backup link. But since it replaces the entire link with an iframe and the ad blocker removes the iframe there's nowhere to put a backup value.