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@mike Good morning! I think I found a recently introduced bug in Flipboard's sharing feature. I work on @morehubbub and customers are reporting that Flipboard is no longer pulling in the og:description that is provided. Can someone on your team confirm this for us? I can provide many examples if needed. Thank you!

@cdevroe @morehubbub Thanks for reporting this Colin! I'm ccing @FlipboardCS and @greg.

Greg Scallan :verified_red:

@mike @cdevroe @morehubbub @FlipboardCS Colin, can you give me some example url's where this is happening?

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS

Here is a Flipboard share URL from my personal blog as a quick example. We’ve had many customers report this issue so I checked about a dozen of their sites, same result. Until recently, this page would show you the og:description just under the title.

share.flipboard.com/bookmarkle

share.flipboard.comFlipboard

@cdevroe @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS I'll ask in engineering ... the bookmarklet itself has not changed in eons. Does the blog post look ok once flipped into the magazine? Roughly when did people start noticing a difference? Any more domains (not urls, just domains) I can add to the list to look at? Feel free to PM me those if you prefer.

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS

Here are two: twocityvegans.com/vegan-baked-

and: allwaysdelicious.com/korean-ra

The "description" coming into Flipboard once flipped is no longer the og:description tag as it has typically been. It is now pulling from the main content of the page, which produces less than stellar results. See screenshots.

Is there a better endpoint for Hubbub to be using then the bookmarklet URL?

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS Is there anything we can tell our customers while this is being looked at?

@cdevroe @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS We made changes for cdevroe.com, twocityvegans.com and allwaysdelivious.com. However, the latter, we get data from the RSS feed, so we may need them to update the description for items in there.

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS I really appreciate your team looking into this. I still see the same issue for those domains. And I'm unsure if handling those domains is a good approach. We have many tens of thousands of websites that are affected currently. I'd be happy to chat with the engineer.

Re: RSS, this issue we're having is for single URLs being shared.

@cdevroe @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS You are talking to him 🙂 ... so I just flipped this article (twocityvegans.com/creamy-vegan) into my magazine (flipboard.com/@greg/just-becau) and it definitely grabbed the og:description to use instead of parsing the HTML for the excerpt (you can see the text starts with "Cutting back on dairy? Creamy vega"....). Unfortunately, we cannot default for all domains to use og:description for the excerpt ... so there is really no way for us to come up with a rule to do this across the board unless we change the share extension to let users or domains make it a default.

Two City Vegans · Unleash the Flavors: Creamy Vegan Red Pepper Pasta RecipeCutting back on dairy? Creamy vegan red pepper pasta offers a delicious alternative. Packed with flavor & cashews for a rich & creamy sauce, letting you enjoy your favorite pasta dish without cheese.

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS OK! When you said “I'll ask in engineering…." I thought... nevermind! I'm glad I'm talking to a fellow nerd.

Until just a few days ago Flipboard’s share endpoint showed the og:description right on the page before flipping the URL into a mag. When it changed, users immediately saw the change and notified us. Our publishers rely on being able to supply that. What can we do at this point now that it has changed then?

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS I'm sorry to be a thorn... but I just want to follow up on this so that we can have an official answer for our customers... Is it that Flipboard will no longer show the og:description in the share page (but, does on the magazine page)? Or, is it that this is now changed to no longer work for all sites? Happy to do a Zoom. At this point we have several thousand websites wondering.

@cdevroe @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS The short answer is we have been unable to confirm that og:description ever worked on the share page (that code has not changed since 2013, so we are at a loss). Honestly, we do not have an ability to updater that code, so I don't think any changes can happen there. When flipping into magazines, we cannot default to og:description, so we need to do per domain overrides to utilize it when flipped into a magazine. If you send me your list of domains, we can import all those domains for the override. That's the best I can do unfortunately.

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS OK. Thank you for that explanation. Here is a screenshot from December 2023 where Flipboard used the og:description without user interaction as far as we can tell.

Do you have any recommended changes we should make to Hubbub to share title, description, and image to Flipboard properly? We'd be happy to make an update.

@cdevroe @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS

After discussing with the team and looking at the business logic, use og:title and og:image for the title and image respectively. Because we cannot make og:description the default over other rules, a suggestion is to create a new meta node that you want us to use that uses “flipboard-article” as the class as we already have default rules that will target it and set it to article.

That would be the easiest way for you to adjust multiple domains without us having to do that work on a per domain basis.

Hope this helps and makes sense.

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS I think I'm lost on “we cannot make og:description the default over other rules". What other rules? Would it be possible to do a Zoom? I sincerely appreciate all the time you've already taken to answer these questions. But I think I must be missing something.

@cdevroe @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS It's hard to explain, 14 years of business logic for processing the world wide web we cannot readily alter or change.

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS Again, I very much appreciate your time corresponding about this. Is there a document that shows what Flipboard parses from HTML and how it is used? Thanks.

I don’t think providing you with 60,000+ URLs would be too helpful long term. I’ll let our users know that, as best as we can tell, og:description is no longer used consistently by Flipboard. And that they can control title and image as they used to. At least they will know.

@cdevroe @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS What I mean is, instead of using og:description, just use the following

<meta class="flipboard-article" content="articleDescriptionHere">

where articleDescriptionHere is the same text you would have in og:description

No need to provide us with any url's, just add the above to them.

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS I will do this in a fairly near future upcoming release. Thank you!

@greg @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS Hi Greg. We are shipping this code soon. I just want to confirm that the meta tag should have a class attribute, not a name attribute?

@cdevroe @mike @morehubbub @FlipboardCS that is my understanding talking to the team. Sorry I have been MIA ... was out all last week and just catching up

@greg I hope you were somewhere fun and relaxing.