This is different from the routine cases where a link has an “Unavailable” notice, because in this phenomenon the entire link has disappeared. Moreover, a check of YouTube shows that the vanished videos are still available. Also, it can’t be attributed to the link “aging out,” because the 500 posts of the latest incident span a period of several years. Even more peculiar, a small number of randomly scattered links among the missing ones are still intact.
Some had hearted it just today, and so I went to see what it was about, and I could only see the text, no video previews.
So, first I did was to click the edit pencil, then I added extra empty lines in between, then saved, I guess this forced the forum to update the video links because now I got previews.
But it turned out that the 2nd video preview that should’ve shown the Karaoke version only showed the YouTube error preview … that video wasn’t online anymore … so a nice side effect was that I had the opportunity to exchange it with another.
You were comparatively lucky. In most of the older disappearances, the text as well as the preview has vanished. Moreover, virtually all of them are too old to be edited, so it is not possible to add a new link. (BTW, does anyone know the time limit for editing old posts?)
Clearly a bug, but is it in Discourse or in the OGS interface with Discourse?
Can you share an example post where the text has also disappeared?
The time limit for editing posts is 1 month, however, moderators can still edit old posts.
With a bit of testing, it appears that the broken posts (that I’ve checked) still have the original contact intact in the source text, but the video preview has simply disappeared. Editing the old posts seems to fix the issues, however, it would be quite painful to have to manually fix every post.
I think it is a bug in the forum software and maybe it’s interface with YouTube. Hopefully a future software update resolves the issue without manual case-by-case fixing.
Couldn’t it also be that YouTube changed something?
Also, I’d think it is a Discourse bug—or a forum setting?—rather than something to do with the connection of OGS with the forum. But I understand little of these things.
There a lot of posts that were simply a YouTube link, so those that are messed up simply appear as blank. As far as I can tell, that particular post only had a YouTube link and I have gone ahead and fixed the post by editing it.
What I want to clarify and specifically asks about is if there appears to be any situations where actual text content (besides the link text) seems to have disappeared from a post, such as what seems to be said here:
@Conrad_Melville, do you have any examples where there is a post, which you knew had some text, but is now gone? Or is that not what you meant?
No text unrelated to the link has disappeared so far as I know. I was following the distinction that trohde had made. What I meant was that the link text did not remain behind when the preview version disappeared in all of the cases I looked at. In trodhe’s case, the disappearance of the preview left behind the link text.
You mean the URL, like https://www.youtube.com/… or https://you.tube/…, was not visible instead of the preview where the preview had disappeared, right?
When I follow your link I see a YouTube preview and the song plays when I click on it. There is no text there because the thread is specifically for links only (“no chit-chat”).
Yup, I searched there also but couldn’t find anything.
(But I must admit that I didn’t search deeply, don’t have the time currently, computer is dying and I must prepare for saving and migrating stuff to new machine.)
Maybe at some point the posts’ HTML needed to be rebuilt (“rebaked”) and we got rate-limited by YouTube. In any case the HTML needs to be rebuilt again for those broken posts.
If you search for things like “rebake topic” there are various suggestions about how to do bulk fixes, like in here: