New link preview feature downloads huge image files

[Mark]

@vapvarun Thank you Varun!

[Mark]

@vapvarun I did some looking around for alternatives that offer URL preview for activity stream posts and the one I found that worked great was by a company called rtMedia. I noticed their plugin doesn’t pull/download images for the preview locally, but instead uses the image from the linking website. While I’m sure this isn’t ideal for all scenarios (e.g., if the website blocks image hotlinking), but it seems much more efficient overall. This will certainly reduce site loading times (especially when there are lots of activity stream posts with urls), download times (if a URL’s image is super huge, as mentioned by @acroyes), and will save disk space as well, especially when users delete their activity as there won’t be any orphaned/unattached images left on the server. Is there a reason why you guys decided to set up the plugin to download images locally for the URL preview feature? It works great but just doesn’t seem super efficient. Would love to not have to rely on rtMedia to do have this feature as your Buddyboss Wall plugin has it built in. With a little finessing of this feature your plugin will be flawless. By the way I love your Facebook Wall and Like functionality (the main reason I bought it), it is one of the best additions to a Buddypress powered site bar none!

Regards,

Mark

[Mark]

@vapvarun Another thing you will want to run by your developers regarding the URL feature in addition to the stuff I just mentioned is to put a word cap on the meta description that is pulled automatically and displayed on the activity stream. For example, this url – http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/NFL-committee-recommends-Raiders-Chargers-for-6754038.php has a super long meta description and it looks horrible on the activity stream. The rTMedia plugin for comparison has a word cap on the meta description and it even puts a read-more link for those URLs which are huge like the example I provided above. Seems the URL preview feature on your plugin needs a lot more work. Hope you find my findings insightful and hope to see you guys improve your plugin by implementing some of the more important ones I’ve mentioned.

Best Regards,

mark

[Brian]

@markob17 Downloading a huge image file from another site will be just as slow, if not slower (because of the extra DNS request) than hosting the image yourself. Furthermore, hosting it yourself allows you to reduce the image size to something more reasonable for displaying in an activity feed (thus, faster load time). Lastly, many people, including myself, run https sites which is the future, but we can’t count on all the sites linked to have https hosted images. For all these reasons, hosting the image is the best solution despite the added disk space.

I do like your other suggestions and think BuddyBoss Wall could do more to make it easier to use for users and site owners. Thanks for pushing them on this and championing more improvements!

[Mark]

@acroyes These are some great points Brian, thanks for sharing. I agree with you, makes a lot of sense now. I think if they fix the meta description issue for URL’s with long ones but more importantly the issue of image files being left behind on the server if an activity update is deleted, this URL preview feature of the plugin would be nearly perfect.

[Varun Dubey]

Hi @markob17, thanks for your input we will also add cap on meta desc to limit it.
Regards
Varun Dubey