I rather like the way Discourse automatically displays inline images and videos. However, in this post - Men, is Sitting on Your Own Nuts a Thing? - the video and associated audio automatically plays. Autoplaying video should not be a thing.
Oy, that happened in a different thread too. It’s not happening to me here, for some reason. It’s definitely a problem.
Here’s where I wrote about it:
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/audio-autoplaying-in-topic-thread/916188/11
Took me a while to actually get the video in that thread to actually autoplay. I suspect its a function of when the offending post actually gets loaded into the browser. In the case of the thread I linked to, it’s still so short and the post with the video is early enough that it just plays automatically when you first open the thread.
It’s not happening on my phone, but it could on the computer. Usually reloading the thread causes it to re-autoplay.
Some links just autoplay, and we don’t know ahead of time which ones not to link to.
I knew something autoplayed when I opened that thread, but I didn’t know what it was because that video was halfway down the thread.
And I agree that it’s Not Cool. Nothing on the site should make a noise unless you tell it to.
It autoplayed for me on Android Firefox.
Sorry, that link would be mine. For the record, it doesn’t autoplay on my phone, Android Chrome.
However, I too agree autoplay videos are annoying and if I knew it was gonna do that, I wouldn’t’ve posted it.
ETA: When I clicked the link in the OP, the video didn’t autoplay for me on my laptop either (Chrome).
Yeah, it’s crazy that we don’t know beforehand which links will autoplay.
And it appears that it’s video from the same site that caused the problem before: getyarn.io.
I unfortunately coudln’t answer the question last time on how to report it to Discourse or to the site itself. But those two places would seem to be the best place to report it, if someone knows how. Either the code Discourse uses or the site’s embed code is messed up and allows autoplay when I don’t believe that is intentional.
Though maybe our mods can float it up the chain.
I wonder, @engineer_comp_geek, @Ed_Zotti if there are any options that will let you blocklist a site from showing a card. If you just block URLs from getyarn.io from getting a card, that would probably handle it.
Last ditch would just be making a rule that you don’t use bare URLs from that particular site.